Stlukesguild

Suddenly... as suddenly as my work had changed upon the loss of my studio... I found myself thinking that as much as I loved collage and geometry and pattern and everything else I had explored in this body of work, I couldn't imagine myself working in this manner for the rest of my life. Nearly all the art that I stared upon daily hanging on my studio "wall of fame" was figurative art:



Nearly all of the hundreds of monographs on artists that lined my library were figurative painters. I believe the defining moment came as I wandered through an exhibition of the great Renaissance painters of Venice (Giorgione, Titian, Veronese, and Bellini) shown at the national Gallery in Washington. I was suddenly beset with that passion... that desire to once again draw and paint real objects... landscapes... and most of all... people.

I began simply... painting the everyday objects that lay around me:





Immediately I recognized the fact that I had certainly learned much from my exploration of collage. It taught me a great deal about compositional structure... but more importantly it taught me even more about persistence... perseverance... and slow methodical production. As a young painter I had the illusion that the only way one might infuse a painting with passion or emotion is to actually produce it in a passionate/emotional state. Unfortunately, the end result was often chaos... incompletion... or at best a few passages of brilliance surrounded by a wealth of flaws, inaccuracies, spatial confusion, and just plain sloppiness. I now realized that one was far more likely to produce something of real merit when one work methodically... professionally... with a degree of tenacity: grabbing on to the original vision and seeing it to its conclusion through the calm and clear-eyed employment of all the skills one had at hand.

This became even more obvious as I made the big jump back to working with the figure. I had long been enamored of pastel as a student... and I was greatly impressed with the achievements of Edgar Degas, Odilon Redon, Jim Dine, and R.B. Kitaj in that medium. Not knowing any better I set for myself the task of producing a body of large, painting-scaled pastel drawings as part of the work I was to do for a college drawing course taken in order to renew my teaching license.

As I began drawing in pastel I was fascinated with the way in which the layers of dry pigment recalled the weathered surfaces of old fresco paintings. I began to look closely at early Italian fresco painters: Cimabue, Giotto, Simone Martini, the Lorenzetti Brothers, Fra Angelico, etc... As I explored their work I became enthralled with their use of pattern and their rather tilted and flattened sense of space. In concert with these artists I also began to look once again... and with a greater enthusiasm... at Medieval art, Byzantine mosaics, Islamic and Persian miniatures, Indian painting, and Japanese painting and woodblocks. All of this obsession with pattern resulted in a body of large pastel paintings that fully embraced a sensory overload: flattened space, patterns and tessellations, and even gold leaf:


Eve


Eve- detail


Eve II

As this body of work began to grow it surrounded me until I began to sense that I was almost in a Renaissance chapel covered with fresco paintings... of my own making. I was able to actually see these works hung in a college gallery after having completed about 6 or 7 drawings:


Installation view


Installation view


The Three Muses

Standing at nearly 7 feet tall each drawing entails at least 40-60 hours of actual labor... and as many as 140. Beside the source of inspiration already mentioned these paintings/pastels were deeply influenced by the erotic sculpture of India and the paintings of Gustav Klimt and are clearly sexualized/eroticized icons:


Annunciation

The paint (acrylic) and pastel is applied in layer after layer achieving a very tactile, weathered surface:



The rough textural surfaces are played against the most rigid geometric structures:



The figures are simplified... abstracted or idealized to a certain extent... and flattened out to a great degree in order that they might sit well within the flattened space... but there is still a certain degree of anatomical rendering:




Leda





These last few images are my most recent work. Admittedly there are elements that do not yet satisfy me... but then again I have only returned to working from the figure for some 9 months (or thereabout) and the figure is unquestionably the most challenging subject in art. I am presently working at honing certain skills. I am also working toward taking the next body of work further in terms of expression. The current work has a certain formal "beauty" but my intention is to begin to bring in to play a further degree of emotional/psychological expression... and a greater (albeit ambiguous) degree of narrative...