I’ve added a few new paintings to the archive this week. This is a group of nine smaller paintings that I worked on all at once, seven on textured polypropylene and two on a couple pieces of gesso board that I’ve had lying around forever and thought for some reason now would be a good time to give them a try. I finished this group of paintings last week and amazingly this actually represents the first batch of finished work for 2021!
We are what, four and a half months into 2021? It isn’t that I haven’t been working this whole time, but I’ve mostly been working on big canvases and this exercise in working smaller was actually in response to the fact that I’ve produced so many big canvases lately. The thing with the canvases is that I work on them loose and I stretch them afterwards, so I do actually have a bunch of big canvases queued up to be stretched. The last time I stretched canvases was just before my last residency period for my MFA program at Lesley, so those all got stretched in December as 2020 paintings.
Anyway, the crazy thing is that apart from some sketchbook work I didn’t do anything in 2020 that wasn’t a giant canvas. Looking back I think the smallest painting I made in 2020 was 54 x 54”.
So why go small? It’s good to mix things up. I also think it is important not to get to comfortable and to introduce some challenges to the work. Going big solves some problems for me; I like to put a lot into a paining and the more space I have the more I can put in there. Going small requires a bit more restraint, or at least a sort of curatorial capacity to know what should go in and what should go somewhere else.
It’s also nice to be able to work on multiples. These nine paintings put together didn’t take up as much table space as one of my recent canvas paintings. With multiples that curatorial process is easier: things that don't go in one painting can go into another. The paintings can diverge but remain related. It can be easier to see different possible futures for where the work can go. All very exciting, and I am excited about the energy in these pieces. It’s bit of a throwback to 2019 in terms of compositional elements, but it doesn't feel like going backwards to me. I’ve put these all in the Patten and Abstraction category in the Archive. What do you think?
Just a technical note, I’m trying something with the edges here, you might notice these images sort of look like they are framed, that’s actually my work table surface behind the painting which the painting is lying on. I’ve selectively desaturated it in Photoshop. This is to let you see the real edges of the paintings, and not a cropped perfect rectangle. Do you think this is too busy? Should it be against a perfect white background? Do you prefer the perfect cropped rectangle? Comment below please.