Painting
4 galleries
When I was a kid living in NYC my mother used to take me to art galleries. Even then I was completely absorbed by abstract painting. I would stand in front of works by Rothko, Pollack, Seurat, and countless others mesmarized by what I would "see" and "feel" in their works. When I took to fine art photography, much of how I saw things and my "vision" was influenced abstract painting. And, in fact, many people viewing my abstract photography have told me they thought it was a painting, yet all of it is created in-camera, with no photoshop "filters" or modifications. It is just the result of how I "see" things.
For years I had been tempted to put paint on a canvas and see what it evoked. Enter the pandemic..It was my "invitation", and I accepted it wholeheartedly. The paintings shown here represent my initial forays into the world of abstract painting. These were photographed with no more than my cell phone with available room light, out of an urge to get them up. Better photographs of them will follow.
I have been looking to the techniques and compositional qualities of some of those whose works I have admired since I was a kid in a museum - Rothko, Pollock, Richter - and more recently dozens or talented painters whose work I have seen on Instagram.
Using those techniques I have ventured into working toward finding my own vision. What you see here are the results of my early journeys on the road to painting...I hope you enjoy some of them.
They are all done with acrylic paints, most on canvas, and some on paper.
For years I had been tempted to put paint on a canvas and see what it evoked. Enter the pandemic..It was my "invitation", and I accepted it wholeheartedly. The paintings shown here represent my initial forays into the world of abstract painting. These were photographed with no more than my cell phone with available room light, out of an urge to get them up. Better photographs of them will follow.
I have been looking to the techniques and compositional qualities of some of those whose works I have admired since I was a kid in a museum - Rothko, Pollock, Richter - and more recently dozens or talented painters whose work I have seen on Instagram.
Using those techniques I have ventured into working toward finding my own vision. What you see here are the results of my early journeys on the road to painting...I hope you enjoy some of them.
They are all done with acrylic paints, most on canvas, and some on paper.
Loading ()...
-
6 imagesI have loved Mark Rothko's color field paintings since first seeing them when I was about 5 years old in NYC. The works I show here represent my "take" on what Rothko did. Very different from what he did, but clearly influenced by it, as much as it is by my distinct vision of what do do with "color fields". -
11 imagesIn these bodies of work I am borrowing from the techniques of Gerhard Richter and Jackson Pollock, two painters who apply paint in very different, and unique, ways. I am really stimulated by the "squeegee and scraping" work of Gerhard Richter. While he tends to work on large canvases with squeegees that are probably six feet long, I work smaller, using everything from various sizes of putty knives from a hardware store, to longer "squeegees" of various materials and densities. It's all about the process of adding painting intuitively, and then scraping it away intuitively - adding, subtracting and repeating. For my Pollock inspired work, I use much smaller canvases, and anything from chopsticks to paint stirring sticks to drip, fling, drizzle and drop paint onto a canvas laying flat on my work space. i typically do this painting to music, which influences my color choices, my arm movements and every thing else. Like Pollock, I am choreographic an acrylic string dance on canvas. -
9 imagesUntil fairly recently, all may painting was done in a studio, mostly with music playing. Then a friend asked me if I wanted to go with her to paint outside somewhere - "plain air" as they say. I didn't think I'd like it or that it would inspire me. Turns out I loved it. I'll be doing more. It's where I get the inspiration to play with abstract realism as opposed to the purely intuitive work I do in the studio -
2 imagesAn art teacher/artist friend of mine strongly encouraged me to do "mark making". I had resisted it feverishly, despite how much I like work by artists like Wassily Kandinsky. One day I bought a couple of boxes of acrylic marking pens and started to "play". Here is what came of it, so far... I like it...Not as much as the other types of painting I do, but I like it enough to keep at it. We'll see where it goes.