Wired-Part Two

Another drawing from yesterday. Reading postcards from friends at the beach puts me in mind of jellyfish. Jellyfish, vases, lampshades and women's skirts are all designed around a central axis.

3-D Chrome-Plated Lettering

There is a series of paintings in a tin box in my studio (recovered with much effort after the bankruptcy of the gallery that represented me here in Minneapolis), line variations drawn in gouache on 10" square Arches paper. I've shown them here before. It's surprising to me how abstract lines can conjure so many different kinds of complexity, botanical, metallic, fleshy, nubile, kinetic. Two adjacent lines suggest two dimensions, three lines in concert conjure space. The fun is in avoiding what common perspective wants the lines to represent.

By attaching a visible side to both edges of a letterform, which is something more concrete, and giving the whole thing a twist, you are using Picasso's tricks, which are the same tricks Frank Gehry uses with architecture. This may be why this particular lettering exercise makes me think of Bilbao. I was never very good at perfect lettering. Inability makes an artist better at breaking rules. So I like breaking letterforms apart, twisting them, stretching them. Put on your 3D glasses and tell me how this looks. (I'm accepting gallery queries for my tin box of paintings. Suitable for framing.)

Experiments

A painting from my spectrum series. I paint things differently for the page than for hanging on the wall. Illustration is about subject but a painting on the wall can be about anything or nothing, like this one. So why do I love looking at it and what am I seeing? A critic could probably explain it for me and I could paint an illustration of what he explained. By the way, I am still looking for a new gallery to sell my art.

Iconography

This is one of my favorites from the dot series. I love it because it is so meaningless, which is another way of saying it could mean anything. I do no sketches and study no reference for this kind of painting. I carefully paint the dots, then quickly add the icons. I can't be thinking of anything or looking at anything or trying to say anything, which sounds kind of like bullshit. I suppose it is. I'm curious to see what comes out of the brush when I'm not trying to draw anything in particular. If something concrete comes into my head I make sure it's painted upside down. This is called method. It's a variation on the method I use to paint bagatelles, a way of tricking the subconscious into committing itself to paper.