7' x 2.5'
Oil and Acrylic on Burlap and Collaged Paper.

Back to the rectangle

After the conversation i had with Mike Glier I decided that it would be in the best interest of my work to move back to the rectangle. I feel this decision was very important because i am not going back to something with a ton of knowledge that i gained from working away from it.

Some Portaits

These are just a couple of one to two sitting paintings that I did in order get a break from the rest of my work. They are both oil on primed paper and 15'' x 11''.

Reflection.

As i continued to work on these oddly shaped works I began to like them less and less.
In every critique i had, weather it be group or personnel, it seemed that then only thing that is positive that comes up is the unusual shapes of these works. People say "oh cool i like the stitching and the weird shape," but when it comes to the actual painting it seems that there is nothing there.

I had been working on a painting of stripped pieces that was about ten feet wide and 2 feet tall that resembled something like a dessert, as well as a vertically separated piece that was about 5 and a half feet tall, only this painting broke the third dimension and continued onto the floor into the direction of the viewer. All of these ideas seemed interesting, new and fresh, but they were still missing something.

Just about that time i could not work on these paintings anymore out of frustration, we had a visiting artist named Mike Glier come and visit and give individual crits with some of the seniors. This would normally be an awesome experience, but i was so frustrated that the thought of haveing to discuss my work with a famous artist was nauseating. As we talked about my work it became obvious that the only piece he was interested in was the first one that i had done. The one that was a rectangle. Imagine that.

What i drew from the conversation was quite helpful, as frustrating as it was at the same time. When a person looks at a rectangular painting on the wall it is understood that they are supposed to be looking into a window of sorts, and strive to view this as reality. When the rectangle gets broken it confuses the viewer, they become so focused on the odd shape that it starts to seem impossible to look at the painting that is on the shape, and it turns into just a shape on the wall.

After this conversation I just started to dissect my work and make a lot of studies to try and figure what to do next. This is the result.

Further exploration of non-rectangular paintings, and geometric forms in regards to the citycape.

Upon finishing my previous painting, the only logical thing to do was to continue with the exploration of the non-rectangular painting.

I was unsure of the shape that i wanted this canvas to take, so i began looking at some painters and paintings that could provide me a little bit of inspiration. I settled upon Marcel Duchamp's Nude descending a staircase. The painting was of interest to me because of the strong ability that it was to draw the viewers eye in a certain direction through brushwork. The fact that we as westerners read from left to right is another observation that stuck wtih me as i was creating this piece.



This piece was another exploration of material that involved house paint, as well as oil Paint. It is about seven feet tall when hung on the wall and is on unstretched canvas.

Experimantal Piece

I decided to continue working with the idea of sewing canvas together, but in this scenario i decided to break out of the standard rectangular plane that most painting is done in. Another goal that i was striving for in making this piece was an attempt to play even more with material and technique in regards to applying paint. It is about three feet tall and is made of thread, canvas, house paint, oil paint, and charcoal.

This is the first full painting that i did this semester. I tore the canvas into separate strips, then using needle and thread i sewed the pieces back together in order to create a riff that could possibly interrupt or work hormoniously with the image that i was going to place upon it.

The medium used for this was some very old Latex house paint that i found in the basement of my house when i was moving out this summer. this thought of using something that most people would disregard opens up an interesting conversation between the mat, old, expired paint and the big abandoned factory type building that is portrayed in the image. Although i Painted this on an unstretched canvas, i do plan to stretch it in the coming days, in order to give the piece a bigger presence when it is displayed.

This is just a series of studies that i was working on at the beginning of the semester in order to get myself warmed up to, as well as used to the idea of my own studio work. I initially started to work off of a series of photos that i took this summer and mainly worked with different mediums and the physicality of the process. These pieces are combination of latex paint, gesso, primer, different types of paper, chalk pastel, oil pastel, and charcoal.

Final Printmaking Project

The only guidelines that were set for our final project this semester were that we had to create a series of prints that related to each other in some fashion.
I decided to work using Stone Lithography, focusing on the subject matter that involved figures in certain settings. My plan was to use the sketchy frantic style of mark making that i had explored in my "Minotaur" piece.

First Attempt at Tousche Wash

This was a landscape assignment created in order to try and learn how too work using the Tousche wash method in stone litho. The image was just something that i pulled off the internet in order to play with it. It is defiantly easy to tell that the Tousche method is much more difficult to use that simply using the grease pencil. The Tousche is much less responsive to the acid in etching, And when printing it is very difficult to get gray tones. Im not very excited with how this piece turned out, but it was valueble learning experience.

Product of All Night Prent Session

The Minotaur.


This semester my class decided to organize an all night print session, which is exactly what it sounds like. The class gets all nigh passes in order to be aloud to stay in the Print Shop all night without getting kicked out. I started the session with only a Stone that already had an image on it so i had to grind the stone, edge of the sides, come up with an image, put the image on the stone, etch the stone, and the print the stone. I think we started around ten and finished up at 5 Thirty or so.

Initially i was thinking about this odd little sketch that i did in my sketch book while i was watching the movie "The Elephant Man." I was trying to think of other animals that i could combine with man and the figure of the minotaur came up, half man half bull. So i came up with a few gesture drawings, and instead of taking a long time to produce a well rendered image, i decided that it would be fun to use the energy that you get from a gesture drawing to produce a sort of aura about this charecter. It is from a series of ten.

First Stone Lithograph

So this was my first Attempt at Stone Lithography. it came out pretty good, and was the first step to me falling in love with this process. It was done using only the grease pencil and no Tousche wash, and was printed in a series of ten. Its just a self portrait of myself dressed up in a suit, merely a simple image to work from in order to learn the process.

First Aquatint

So this was my first ant only Attempt at an Aquatint, I like the process, but over the course of the semester i got so into Stone Lithography that it sort of fell by the wayside. The subject is just something that i pulled out of my head in order to give the process a shot.

"Dante and Virgil leave behind the sowers of dischord"

"Dante and Virgil Leave Behind the Sowers Dischord"
Hot Worked Glass, Light, and Shadow.


This a glass piece that I did this semester in my advanced glassblowing course. I was working with the way that light interacts with glass, and i was pushing the specific technique of melting glass cane onto bubbles, while they were still hot, hence the raised glass lines that form the figures. it is a scene from "Dante's Inferno."

Saville based Painting

This is a piece that i did based off of the style of the contemporary painter Jenny Saville. She rules.
Her work is often charecterized by very large paintings of women in a very different way then most people would imagine. They are also gigantic. I was just at a Show in Rocehster and saw one of her pieces, it was 10'x12'... That's right 12 feet!

I did not get quite as gnarly with this one.
Oil on Stretched Canvas
5'x5'3"

Self Portrait.

Self Portrait
Oil on Stretched Canvas

This painting to me started off as just a personal excercise in rendering facial structure and fabric, as i started to work on the background it turned into this weird nightmare scene, my profesor kept asking me why i was painting it like that, and at the time my only answer was that its all i could think of. I was thinking more about this idea of why I paint what I paint as the semester went on, and i think it boils down to me painting things that i see and other people don't. weather this be dream like scenes from the depths of my imagination or places that very few people get so see in real life. It seems one of my goals is to put the abstract into something more concrete.

Crack House.

Interior Space with Distortion
Oil on Stretched Canvas

Inferno.

Landscape painting with details
Oil on Stretched canvas.

Junior year.

Well now that i have all of my stuff posted from sophmore year, I can start in with the stuff that I have been working on recently. Along with getting my work "out there" I am hoping that this Blog will help me be able to look at my work more as an outside source, and therefore improve my concept and technique more efficiently.

Fetus works.

Untitled
Cast Wax, Wire, Found Wood, Heat






Untitled
Sculpted Glass, Found Plastic, Found Box, Fake Blood.