Mentor, 2nd semester

So, my new mentor is the painter Emily Eveleth. It just so happened that I was introduced to her during the Group 2 residency during one of the Artist Talks. It was very serendipitous, and was a definite plus to have been able to secure a mentor so early in the game this time around.

Emily is represented by Howard Yezerski in Boston and Danese in NYC. At this very moment, she has a wonderful retrospective of her "doughnut oeuvre" at the Smith College Museum of Art in Northampton, Mass. I think I kind of surprised her by showing up for the opening night, where she gave a fun talk in the main gallery, surrounded by her incredible work. I HIGHLY recommend seeing the work in person, as her paint quality is super-rich. Confronting these sugary giants is quite something to experience; she paints quite large most of the time. Bonus: SCMA has a terrific collection, which really surprised me with a number of gems.

Right now, I have a few concepts in varying stages, all of which I hope to execute on a large (60") scale. Emily is the perfect person with whom to talk about the technical ins-and-outs of working bigger. My first meeting with her is next week and I'm really looking forward to it!

In the meantime, I'll be publishing a Residency 2 summary in just a few days.

Study/Experiment With New Materials

Here's a study for a much larger work. This "study" is 24" x 24" already, but I needed the working room for the new materials. I used tar (roofing tar, specifically), enamel (Rustoleum, almond color), some VanDyck Brown and mineral spirits. Most of this is painted with chemical-proof gloves, not brushes. And lots and lots of rags! These materials are hard as hell to work with and fairly counterintuitive to the normal opaque-medium painting process. There's some surface concerns in terms of the way it sets up, and I may introduce some shellac, but we'll see in a few days when it stabilizes. Oddly enough, other than the possibility of the enamel being a bit brittle, the tar compound will be nice and flexy, so I'm fairly confident it won't explode on me.

When I finish the final work, I'll elaborate on my intentionality, but you can probably guess why I'm using petroleum-based products for this subject matter.

New Work

Atelier 2010 - oil on canvas, 24" x 24"

Flyover - oil on canvas, 24" x 36"

Pteronychus - oil on canvas, 12" x 12"

Not a great deal of quantity, but this past semester was more about searching for new ways to conceptualize and deal with my art in a more critically rigorous manner. If you go to the post "Works In Progress", you'll see that a lot of what I was working on I was conceptual experimentation. Using the examples of that post, you can see I was attempting to apply pure allegory in order to develop narrative. I essentially abandoned all of those strictly allegorical (and very layered/coded) concepts save one sketch, which I modified and simplified to make "Atelier 2010."

I will be posting a Residency 2 summary very soon, as well as a quick post about my new mentor.