It’s been a minute. I got busy. I had a big commission that really took a lot of my time straight after graduating from my MFA program (I graduated!), and after that I had to focus on moving back into my studio in Lowell and out of our basement (my pandemic studio) so we can make room for a family room and a place for the kids to play and watch tv and stuff.
I’m not quite back up and running in my Lowell studio, but I am making good progress. The space had kind of turned into a bit of a storage space during the pandemic, but I've got it nicely organized now and have removed a bunch of junk. The main setback recently has been that my workbench, the thing I actually put paintings on while I am putting paint on them has for the last several years been made up of three Ikea desks pushed up against each other, the kind with the metal legs that screw into a sort of pressed wood fiber desk surface. Those were all desks I got used in the first place and they’ve been with me through the pandemic basement studio, three different spaces in the Lowell studio building, Miller St. studios in Somerville, Lophouse Studio in Brighton, and Brambleberry Studio in Cambridge. So, they finally gave it up. The screws that hold the surfaces to the metal legs no longer had any grip. The tops of the surfaces were also coated in so much paint that it was actually starting to cause a problem with making my painting surfaces uneven.
So, I tossed them out instead of moving them back. That meant I didn’t have anything to paint on! I wasn’t sure what I was going to do, but last week I hit upon a pretty good solution and I bought a couple of 80” x 36” hollow wooden doors from Lowe’s. I think I can mount the old legs from the desks to these and end up with a nice 80” x 72” work surface that will still fit over the flat-files that hold my big works on Yupo. So! New work coming soon! I am still on daddy duty a lot of the time and mostly usually only have one day a week to get to the studio, but I think I can actually make that a productive day now.
A Butterfly that Lives Forever
In the meantime, I’ve got a bunch of work that I collected in my studio while I was re-organizing stuff that I hadn’t previously cataloged, mostly from 2019 and 2022. I just got pictures of these pieces, and here is the first new piece. It’s called “A Butterfly that Lives Forever”. Let me know what you think in the comments.
This little painting is a swirling vortex of paint and collage material with pencil and marker drawing in the background. Structured pattern is stacked against chaotic poured paint with cartoon doodles, hand-written text, and machine printed elements all layered one on top of another resulting in a system that feels somehow balanced but like it might fly apart at any moment.
This is a little abstract painting on wooden panel.
The painting is available for purchase on Singulart.