blake brasher dot org

Don’t Hold More than You Can Stand to Carry

blake — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 20:06:33 +0000

50" x 73.5" acrylic on canvas - click to enlarge

This large, bright painting was made in my Cambridge, MA studio in January of 2012. It is painted on canvas that I stretched myself over a frame I built over a decade ago while taking painting classes at Harvard. I don’t remember why I thought 50″ x 73.5″ was a good size, and you know when you write it out like that it seems a little silly but when you are in the room with it the dimensions make sense.

This brand new painting is about color and form and escape and birth, penetration and distortion. Mostly it is a really great balanced composition of bright colors with understated muted hues. It has many layers of various levels of transparency.

Like many of my recent paintings, this one started out on the easel, and was moved back and forth between easel and floor a handful of times during the course of its creation. Easel for brushwork and floor for moving large pools of color around. I introduced some complexity in the form of oil and turpentine in the final layer to create a sort of cratered surface in certain areas.

“Don’t Hold More than You Can Stand to Carry” is fitted with a hanging wire for easy installation. The fashionable 1 1/4″ gallery wrap canvas will look good with or without a frame. The sides of the canvas are untreated (aside from a layer of white gesso) and show a number of drip marks.

For a free high resolution image you can use to make your own print please click on one of the thumbnail images to the right. To arrange to see this or any other painting in person, please contact me at blake@blakebrasher.org

This painting is available on Etsy!

Click here to view this painting on Etsy

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A Tool for Obtaining Something Else that is Very Important

blake — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 18:45:29 +0000

36" x 72" acrylic on canvas - click to enlarge

This psychedelic panoramic painting was made in my Cambridge, MA studio in January of 2012. It is painted on canvas that I stretched myself over a frame I built over a decade ago while taking painting classes at Harvard. The stretcher used to have a taller than wide painting of an ex-girlfriend of mine on it, standing in the nude with a sort of judgmental expression on her face. The stretcher has been siting in my basement for years. The old painting is rolled up and stored somewhere else. But enough about what things used to be.

This brand new painting is about life and space and flowers and growth and death. The painting started out on the easel, and was transferred to the floor after laying down a basic composition. On the easel I work mainly with brushes, and on the floor I use pouring techniques and manipulate pools of wet paint with pallet knives and brushes, and I tilt the canvas to manipulate the flow of paint. In the top left 2/3rds of the canvas you can see some evidence of this, there are some long thick upward brush-marks made with a distressed 4′ disposable house painter’s brush (third detail)

After letting the paint dry overnight I moved the painting back to the easel. This second easel session involved a lot of putting a mark down with brushes and then scraping it away after letting it partially dry, or letting a thick brushstroke start to drip, sometimes coaxing it with a spray of water, and then transferring the drip marks from one part of the canvas to another with a sheet of newspaper. I occasionally also use balled up newspaper to create texture and to spread a particular pattern of paint around the canvas without smearing the colors together.

The final session with this painting was on the floor. We got a little messy towards the end, with a lot of dark, thin paint covering much of the canvas. Much of the action in the lower right is achieved by scraping away this dark layer to reveal the brighter colors underneath. The bold thin black lines are achieved with a squeeze bottle, the kind you might find at a roadside diner filled with ketchup or mustard but filled with black paint. I also use those squeeze bottles to lay down pools of color, often putting a pool of one color inside a pool of another color and coaxing them to mingle (first and second detail).

“A Tool for Obtaining Something that is Very Important” is fitted with a hanging wire for easy installation. The fashionable 1 1/4″ gallery wrap canvas will look good with or without a frame. The sides of the canvas are untreated (aside from a layer of white gesso) and show a number of drip marks.

This painting is available on Etsy!

Click here to view this painting on Etsy

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Designed to Enhance

blake — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 20:37:54 +0000

32" x 48" acrylic on canvas - click to enlarge

This painting was made in my Cambridge, MA studio in January of 2012. I stretched this canvas myself over a really nice, gallery profile stretcher frame that used to have this really tacky Popular Science poster print on it that hung in the living room of my cooperative living group for the better part of a decade. The stretching process is rather time consuming, but meditative. I feel like in this case the process of removing the old print from the frame, rest retching new canvas and finally applying three coats of gesso to the painting surface allowed me to develop a relationship with the piece before I even made the first mark. I know that sounds a little hokey, but it really is the case that one of the most important factors in abstract composition is just being free and loose with your materials. Assuming you’ve got the skill and the talent, these thinks can feel kind of like turning on a spigot and just letting the paint flow. Or maybe more like a file transfer from the subconscious to the canvas. If the conscious mind is second guessing every step you’re going to end up with a composition that feels tight and constricted. This painting is not like that. Everything that happened to it just felt right.

I started this painting on the easel, going at it with brushes. Big sloppy brushes, mostly. Especially for the first few passes. I like those $0.99 1″ house painters brushes. After you’ve been using them for a while they start to develop unique character; certain bristols stick together, they don’t all point in the same direction, some bristols break in half and so they are not all the same length. I enjoy it when the lines are not perfect. Any old brush can paint a perfect line. Or I guess, any new brush can paint a perfect line. Only a well seasoned brush will give you a line that only it can paint. And these are acrylics, so you can always paint over the bad stuff.

After covering the canvas with a basic composition in thinned down paint I transferred the painting to the floor, where drips become pools which can be manipulated by pushing them around with pallet knives and brushes, and existing brush marks can be coaxed into smearing out into delicate washes. I then let the painting dry completely and put it back on the easel, where I made some adjustments to the composition, mostly altering the balance of colors and adding some surface details such as the black curvy thin lines punctuated by bold spots. Some of those lines are thrown on splatter painting style, others carefully placed with a thin brush.

For the final treatment I moved the canvas back to the floor and added three pools of milky white paint. I added turpentine to the canvas in areas to push the wet paint away from the existing surface and add some droplets of linseed oil in some pools, pushing buoyant pigments out of their way and exposing the heavier pigments beneath. After the acrylic dried I wiped off the oil, leaving behind a cratered, moon like surface.

Click here to view this painting on Etsy

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Helping Sustain Renewables

blake — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 11:30:51 +0000

18" x 24" acrylic on canvas

This charming little pink, grey, and yellow painting would spruce up any contemporary city kitchen, add a personal touch to your cubical, or class up your college dorm room. It would also look good in any personal art collection. It has some real geological activity going on in it, like if a marble tile got together with a granite counter top and had a baby and that baby grew up and went to school and met some older kids who fed it hallucinogens. And then it goes on to get a degree in astrophysics.

This painting is unframed but will come with a wire installed for easy hanging. It is executed on a 3/4″ profile canvas with unfinished edges which have some drips and splotches on them.

This painting is available on Etsy!

Click here to view this painting on Etsy

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This is About Waiting

blake — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 22:55:41 +0000

triptych: 24" x 18" x three panels - click to enlarge

“This is About Waiting” is a triptych excited on three 24″ x 18″ stretched canvases. If the canvases are hung one half inch apart from each other this painting will occupy a total of 24″ x 55″ of wall space.

Unframed. If you are interested in framing please hit the contact button and let’s talk. Otherwise this triptych is ready to frame or hang unframed. It will ship with a hanging wire on each panel for easy installation.

These colors really do pop. The photos in this listing were taken under natural sunlight and the colors have not been altered in any way. “This is About Waiting” would look great hanging above your couch, in science lab opposite the giant world map, or really anywhere that needs some spacey splashy color.

Private viewing of this and other paintings can be arranged. If you would like to pick up the painting in person we can drop shipping charges. Just send me a message! blake@blakebrasher.org

This painting is available on Etsy!

Click here to view this painting on Etsy

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Opportunity to Win Prizes

blake — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 19:56:18 +0000

40" x 30" acrylic on canvas - click to enlarge

This large, beautiful abstract impressionistic painting would be just the thing to add a bit of color and pizzaz to your space age bachelor pad, modern luxury condo, or private gallery. It is painted on a heavy duty 1 1/2″ profile gallery wrapped canvas with untreated edges so you can see paint drips and smears on the sides of the canvas giving some hints as to the artists process.

“Opportunity to Win Prizes” was painted over the course of a couple of weeks in the fall of 2011 after being started in the spring and set aside for a handful of months. It has many translucent layers and is quite built up in places. It was painted using a technique that involves moving it back and forth between the easel and the floor in order to achieve various dripping and pooling effects.

The painting is unframed, but will ship with a hanging wire installed for easy installation in your home, office, or secret underground compound. Framing is available upon request. Private viewing of this and other paintings can be arranged. If you would like to pick up the painting in person we can drop shipping charges. Just send me a message!

For a free high resolution image you can use to make your own print please click on one of the thumbnail images to the right:To arrange to see this or any other painting in person, please contact me at blake@blakebrasher.org.

This painting is available on Etsy!

Click here to view this painting on Etsy

white border with black text

black border with white text