Tuesday, November 21, 2006


I have strayed from abstraction. I wonder if it is a change in approach due to the normal changes in the course of a painter's life, or if it is a change in response to popular opinion. I am concerned that I'm leaning from the pressure of positive responses to the images I've created where people can say, "Oh, that's a nice _____." With the abstracts, most comments I receive sound like, "Wow, that's really beautiful. What is it?"

The "What is it" is getting me. When I painted "Life's Little Irritations," I simply named the title for what idea I was translating into an image. How do we answer the question as abstract painters: What is it? My most accurate answer would be that it's a combination of oils and pigments that I placed on a prepared cloth using a bunch of hairs held together on a stick. That's what all my paintings are, with sometimes a shell or tile or something glued to the surface as well.

I'm really liking the idea of adding a dimensional inclusion to the paintings for one reason: it makes giclees clearly less than the original. In the movie Multiplicity, the copies got weaker. I remember in my office days putting a sticky note on my master copy so that I wouldn't use it to write on and end up having to copy a copy. I'm using the tile, shell, bits of something unphotographable to make a sticky note on the master. Copy away, but the original IS different. The original is different if simply by the answer to What Is It? A copy is a mechanically printed facsimile on paper or canvas. Not oil, pigments, hairs, stick...

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