This painting is the yin to the yang of the painting I shared yesterday.
It crossed my mind while I was painting these that they were taking a very long time to complete. It didn’t seem to matter.
Along with the white clocks, this piece will be showing at the George Billis Gallery in New York City this September.
Just put the finishing touches on this lock-down project.
Well, to be honest it was going to happen pandemic or no pandemic. I have to say that being able to focus on the tiny details of this painting has been a great way to stay grounded and focused in reality while so much seems to spin out of control.
A fresh 30 x 48-inch painting just off the easel is on the way to The George Billis Gallery in New York. It’s a sturdy Royal FP typewriter from the 1950s. You can take a closer look at it → here.
I have been working on my upcoming exhibition for the gallery’s Los Angeles location and have made major headway, so I am able to send this one to New York for clients to see.
I shared an image of this painting in the final stages on the easel, and here it is complete — shown with some of the cameras I’ve collected so you can get a better idea of the scale of the painting.
This is a companion painting to the clocks that I recently painted. The objects are all functional, they serve a purpose and all fit in the hand. They are painted slightly larger than life-size.
The canvases are twice as wide as they are high — they make you look left to right and I deliberately composed them to form an arch — the images below demonstrate what I’m trying to get across.
The myriad of repetitive circles — the lenses and flashes of the cameras, the faces of the clocks also move your eye along and across the surface of the painting. The details hopefully pull you in. These objects all serve the same purpose, but they have subtle differences that make each one unique.
My goal was to take this very simple compositional style — an object shown straight forward on a white shelf — and transform it into a rather complex scene of minute detail.
Both of these paintings have already been claimed by collectors — I hope they make them happy for decades to come.
This past week I spent some time with some do-overs.
These two paintings are from a few years ago and although they don’t look too unusual for my work, they did before I repainted the backgrounds.
Before these pictures were taken, the backgrounds were what I call explosion blue. They were a vibrant, unnatural, unfamiliar, chemical blue.
They were complete and even hung in a gallery for some time, but I was happy to get them back to correct them. I was pleased with the balance and geometry of the compositions, but the blue was so peculiar to my eyes that I had a hard time looking at the paintings.
I removed the varnish and added some layers of a much more subtle and neutral tone — a white/grey with only the most subtle, barely perceptible hint of blue. Immediately it felt as though my own personality returned to the paintings.
I did the vibrant blue backgrounds on the suggestion from a friend who was giving some opinion on changes they thought would add some “pop” to my work. In a moment of weakness and confusion, I took their advice. It was as though my own signature was removed from my work.
The opportunity for the do-over has been very therapeutic.
Imagine if life were like a painting. Imagine if you could literally get a moment or an event back, remove the varnish and make your corrections.
“Time is a created thing. To say ‘I don’t have time,’ is like saying, ‘I don’t want to.”
― Lao Tzu
“Books have a unique way of stopping time in a particular moment and saying: Let’s not forget this.”
― Dave Eggers
Here are a couple of close-up shots of me working on the details. The final stages of a painting are always the most satisfying. The camera I’m painting was found at Everything Old – one of my favourite places on planet earth.
These are the final two paintings of a dozen new ones for my May 21 – June 25 exhibition at the George Billis Gallery LA.
Each clock is a little character with its different color, its own style. In groupings they interact with each other. Read more
I’m pleased and honored to share a review of my solo exhibition this past June by American Arts Quarterly. Click here if you are so inclined to give it a read.
I’ve been doing several small studies with these clocks over the past few months. This past week was spent working up, larger on this and another piece. A few years ago I contemplated a career in graphic design. I spent time admiring typefaces and layout. Hence, the obsession with the clocks. It’s the numbers that really do it for me. That and the golden edge of the book.