Lost and Found

This painting is like a best of 2010 compilation of my work. By that I mean this painting brings together several disparate elements and styles. We’ve got the drips and swirls I’ve come to like so much like those in Electric Snakes and Toxic Waste, layered graphic elements like the x’s in If He Finds the Muffin Stash He Will surely Eat Them All, and the raw, energetic, abstract expressionist like gestural painting in Escaping From the Lair of a Sleeping Spider Money Monster and Propping Yourself Up In a Questionable Situation. 

I am pleased with how all the different elements that make up the composition of this painting sit with each other. It has a lot of energy, and is full of activity but doesn’t feel artificially packed. It is reminiscent of a heavily graffitied wall in a vibrant urban landscape, each layer relating to those that sit beneath while calling attention to themselves.

I have been experimenting with new techniques, including mixing my paints very wet, working wet on wet on the canvas, and reincorporating dry media into the composition. I use sticks of charcoal and chalk pastel to draw in the wet paint, creating troughs with dark black or bright color between raised walls of paint, or I wait until the paint has dried partially and rub powdered pigment over the still slightly sticky surface, a technique which I first used in paintings from earlier this year such as
Penetrating the Blood Brain Barrier and Strategies and Warfare.

“Lost and Found” is painted on a 1 1/2″ gallery profile canvas with staple free edges. It is ready to hang with or without a frame.