Revolution

This is one of my favorite paintings from my residency at Arthouse Garana in Garana, Romania. I started it the third or fourth night of the residency, after dinner and a couple glasses of red Romanian wine with the other artists. The studio was mostly empty, and I had room to spread out a bit.

I had been trying to figure out how to incorporate the color green into my paintings. Part of our mission at the residency was to let ourselves be inspired and influenced by the landscape. Lots of rolling green hills. Now this may not look like a very green painting to you, it’s leaning a lot more towards green than just about anything else I’ve done.

There are three distinct elements to this painting. The bottom layer is mostly broad sweeping gestures made largely with a pallet knife or thick bristly brushes. On this layer we progress from darker grays and muted blues and whites on the bottom panel up through brighter though still muted yellow greens at the top. The second and third layers are sort of intermingled, so it is hard to assign them orders. Lets call them the spill layer and the eye layer.

The eye layer is the once that is composed of mostly black and white shapes, some of which could be said to look a bit like eyes. That shape is a an evolution of a similar shape scattered across as well as a painting started immediately after which has not yet been finished. I wanted to explore that shape, which is achieved by using a big thick soft brush like what a giant might use to write in Mandarin soaking in wet and flowing black paint. The thickness of line is controlled by pressing into or pulling away from the canvas. These shapes have a real dynamic quality to them. In this painting I think the ones in the middle panel are like the silhouettes of birds, flying upwards. The one with the eye in it at the very top is like a dolphin leaping out of the water. At the bottom they are like swaying pods in a kelp forest. The eyeball effect is achieved by pouring wet white and black paint into each other.

The final layer is the spill layer. I call it the spill layer because it was achieved by pouring very watery paint directly onto the canvas, letting it spread out, following the grooves in the lower layers of paints, coaxing it along by pressing down on the canvas to articulate temporary inclines, and gently pushing bits around with the pallet knife. I think there is something really cerebral about the shapes and patterns that emerge using this technique. I like the interactions between the spills and the eyes. The blue spill is overtaking the eyes in the middle panel, but the top eye in the top panel penetrates and overtakes the green yellow pink spill.

This piece was chosen by the sponsors of the residency to be put in the Resita Art Museum in Resita, Romania.

I think there is a narrative here about achieving a greater awareness, symbolized by the penetration of the green yellow pink spill pattern in the top panel as well as the eyes-open to eyes-clossed to eyes-open sequence between the three panels. The bottom panel is like the bottom of the ocean with drifting pods of kelp, the middle is like birds in the clouds and the top panel is like aliens in space. I dare you to call me out on this interpretation in the comment field below.