Blue Blue Eclectic Blue

28" x 40" acrylic on canvas - click to enlarge

“Blue Blue Eclectic Blue” was the first painting I made at the residency/symposium I did in Verbania, Italy this May. I think those dimensions are accurate, but you know everything is weird and metric over there. One of the blessings and curses of a residency is that you don’t have your own personal studio with your own personal kit so you kind of have to figure out some new tricks right away if you want to get any work done. In this painting I think I learned a sort of new way to engage the canvas with a sort of cloudy white that took over the entire canvas and had to be beaten back. The title is an obvious reference I suppose to David Bowie’s Sound and Vision, “blue blue electric blue, that’s the color of my room.” But let me tell you that blue took over the painting for quite some time too. It was this sort of neon mural paint like I’d never used before and was much more potent than it looked.

More on Verbania and the residency soon, I promise. Right now I’m on a bus to New York and it is hard to type.

This painting was sold at the opening reception for the exhibition at the end of the symposium, so you can’t buy it, but you can make your own print by downloading one of the high resolution images below: