Posts Tagged ‘painting’

Enough is Enough

Posted on: March 9th, 2010
enough-detail

or, “that’s enough” as my mother often said

I’ve been working on re-designing my website and incorporating a news page into it for several months. At the beginning of each of the last four weeks (at least) I’ve told myself: this week I’m going to finish this thing and get it out there. Today, I finally decided enough is enough; so here it is.

I’m not sure how often I’ll write new posts, but I’m hoping it will be often enough to keep it interesting. The image to the left is a detail of a painting that’s on the wall right now. As with more and more of my work, it started with a bunch of words on a page. It now has a few layers of wax on top of the words, but many of the word marks are still quite visible, and even somewhat legible. The writing was all about “enough”, so it seemed fitting for this post.

Vestiges (of work unseen) from VSC

Posted on: March 5th, 2010
vestiges-no2vestiges-05vestiges-03

moving forward and back

Yesterday I went into the print studio to pick up the prints I had done last week. Looking at the work I was reminded of work I’d done at the Vermont Studio Center about 9 years ago. Back then (in 2001 at VSC) I was trying to figure out how to make the Italian paintings appear even more distressed, and fresco/tablet like; Thus I had begun experimenting with using plaster as the surface on which to paint. It was also at that time that I started questioning whether or not the Italian imagery had become too formulaic. So I removed it.

That proved to be quite the challenge for the next several (dare I say, 9) years. I always liked this series of “vestiges”, but I never did show them. I wonder if I have suddenly come full circle, and if so, why it took 9 years to get here. None-the-less it’s a good reminder that the work always leads somewhere, even if we don’t have any idea where that place may be, or why we are headed in that particular direction.

I also went to hear artist Crystal Cawley talk about her work yesterday at MECA. An hour well spent. Her work is absolutely terrific, and the honesty with which she spoke about it including her vague discomfort at times during the process (”is this the dumbest idea I’ve ever had?”) was both refreshing and inspiring.