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  Rocket Launch by Jonathan Marshall |
Oh, Give Me a Home Oh, Give Me a
Home By Rachel Koper Arthouse invited the New Museum's senior curator at large, Dan Cameron, all the way from New York to curate its 20th exhibition of new American talent. In May, Cameron wrote: "Each of the selected artists offers, I believe, a worldview that is sufficiently complete for any viewer to enter fully into their practice and feel psychically at home. For my own part, I hope the results also provide an opportunity for the participating artists to feel that their works look like they belong, since in the end the ideal exhibition is also a visual essay about the resolution that all viewers hope to find: art as a provisionary home away from home." Cameron has succeeded in combining characteristics among purposefully varied media to produce a cohesive and thought-provoking group of artworks. Based on his selections, Cameron feels "psychically at home" surrounded by imagery that is pensive, subtly complex, gorgeous, puritanically paranoid, and lonely. A dry wit or droll humor is also in evidence. The current use of airplane imagery in art is easily tied to post-9/11 cultural concerns. Suddenly airplanes, our practical tools of commerce and icons of the frontier, were turned against us. This brings to mind the premise of much sci-fi: What happens when man-made objects are reborn as monsters or killer robots? The use of the airplane, rocket, and open sky in many of these artworks represents something of a mental quest to reflect on American power and portray technology in a good light. The artists here work extra hard to will away the negative associations that have entered our collective TV-filled thoughts. The grainy photo of a plane by Michael Markos looks like an iconic memory. The vantage point is distant, ambient, and the plane looks older than it is. The airplane is a nostalgic boyhood object for male artists to revisit, like drawing a Porsche 944 or, for girls, a pony. It holds a certain romance; it's put on a pedestal. A sense of loneliness or timelessness can emerge from the empty quality of the sky and emotionally tepid distance of the vista. None of the pieces in this exhibit portray animated people inside an airplane; instead the planes are tiny, mysterious, and far away, rather wondrous and unknowable. This distancing is also clear in the aerial photos by Mark Abrahamson. Taken from a plane, the ground is far away, its inhabitants undescribed. Rocket Launch, an acrylic painting by Austin artist Jonathan Marshall, depicts a cloudy chem trail behind a rising rocket. You can choose your own reference: offensive missiles, the Challenger, American military strength. Marshall has used a flat background color and added a graphic curly outline to the clouds. The careful craftsmanship and fluffy clouds belie the ominous content; a destructive power is implied but in softened, dreamy cartoon fashion. While he was in town helping with the installation, I asked Dan Cameron some questions about Americans. He said, "Americans today feel more isolated than in the past. There is no middle ground." Along those lines, this exhibit appears pleasant but contains dark notes and moments of keen loneliness. Some of the darkness is humorous. Wesley Heiss has too much fun reforming television. His soft sculpture Everlast features a video (with airplanes in it) set into a round red punching bag. When you strike the bag, you operate the television. It's funny, paranoid humor about our passivity with regard to the media. To be American currently is also to feel the emotional burdens of a nation at war, and the show reflects a sense of guilt. Leah Markov-Lindsey's Rx (view two, ambient) is an embroidered pill bottle still life, part pithy pop and part medicine cabinet voyeurism. Regardless of your feelings about crafting, it is a public confession of mental imperfection and frailty. A series of watercolors that look like antique postcards portrays selected moments in evolution in a haunting and saddening way. Steve McClure's Cruelty Makes Memories is composed of 48 images set in rows of four related scenes, from miniature dinosaurs inhabiting a wild misty environment to little humans lynching one another to vacant landscapes to a bit of framed building, and so on. They feel like historical documents of an unromanticized and brutal progression of human development – a strong dark counterpoint to the jewellike quality of the artwork. The sunbleached color scheme and stark composition of Keith Allyn Spencer's Untitled (los vatos) create a distinctly unpopulated image of downtown El Paso. This painting has bits of Diebenkorn's geometry in the architecture's sharp forms and bits of tender detail. The sunburned tone is uniquely sentimental. It seems to say: I heart El Paso – where the streets are deserted at 5:30 and the sun burns and ruins everything. The piece has great character, with Spencer showing how buffing and peeling facades may look like minimal abstract paintings of small warehouses on warehouses. With this modern landscape, Spencer strikes an elegant note of pride, toughness, and solitude. Distant unpopulated vistas abound in this show. Perhaps one of the most ingeniously deceptive and exquisitely crafted is by Paul Chojnowski. At first glance, Nocturne: Midtown appears to be an out of focus sepia-toned photograph of a city at night. But each of its dark tones is burned through the paper; the bright lights in the building windows are simply the natural white of the paper. The range of color, like a fine photo or good print, is exquisite, as is the delicate texture and haziness. This work is just plain gorgeous and cleverly fabricated. J Bennett Fitts' Salton Sea Marina Club is a large color photograph of an abandoned swimming pool at sunset that calls to mind kitschy, romantic, nostalgic, and lonely poetics. The concrete pool has dirt and some aerosol letters in it. The wind whips through a large palm tree. With good use of the magic hour, Fitts captures a haunting moment of suburban light. I think it's pretty packaging but with a rebellious undercurrent and some real longing and charm in it. Fitts succeeds in memorializing an all-American landscape for skateboarders in the not so punk rock style of Texas Highways. It's so contrived and yet magnetically attractive to anyone who liked the movie Dogtown and Z-Boys. Denise Prince Martin's five photographic portraits are also sweetly vacant. Each captures a woman who's all dressed up, like for prom or a wedding, but standing alone, for example, in a seedy bingo hall. They are attractive women and yet somehow need the company of more friends. There is a consistency of feeling to this series: isolation, loneliness, fear of being left behind, nostalgia, and awkward personal memories. Another piece that addresses isolation and social frustration is Serena Lin Bush's installation Speak Easy (who's on first). Two videotaped hands use sign language to act out Abbott and Costello's famous comedy routine with an accompanying laugh track. Sadly, the linguistic puns don't translate at all to signing, giving a sense of being left out of the joke. Cameron said that "media was not at all important in choosing this artwork" and that these artists all share "a return to an interest in image-making, making visual images in new ways. It's very unparticular regarding how the art is made – the video is very pictorial, like moving paintings." While operating clearly under this premise of "visual pluralism," Cameron picked two paintings that seem affected – the type of abstraction that begs you to deconstruct their technique rather than build a narrative. Susan Cheal toys with color theory, teasing out perspective forms then flattening them with poured paint. She loses me completely when she adds stamping in one corner. It's like she's showing how many paint application processes she can squeeze into one painting. The painting by Hillary Wilder shares a similarly technical premise. It's a large tea-colored piece, with camouflagelike line drawings visible through transparent washes. These look nice in some of the sky areas, but in the foreground the colors become heavy and muddy. The title, The Burning of the Houses, is intended to add drama to the one chunky dotted line of thick paint, squeezed from the tube, to imply a distant horizon line. It shares a tragic and faraway tone with other works in the show. This year's smorgasbord of talented new Americans has a nicely refined flavor. Dan Cameron's consistent eye for emotional tone imbues the atmosphere of the rooms with hopeful reflections and proudly nostalgic pieces. The show is accessible, approachable, naturalistic, and basically good-looking. It feels like a summer show. Iconic skyscapes, unpopulated streetscapes, reflected lights, and glares blend with lonely portraits, movable TV sculptures, embroidered prescription drug bottles, videos that wish they were paintings, all speaking together to communicate a certain delicate isolation, not desolate but from the vantage point of a sensitive, reflective person. In his catalog essay, Cameron further addresses the current climate of all-media pluralism. "Those artists who embrace today's pluralistic zeitgeist generally do so with the knowledge that they are not just responsible for making their work, but also for providing a context in which their work makes sense." It's great to see the focus of the content of this show; the messages communicated within the works speak softly and often truthfully about feelings of isolation, autobiography, fear of the military, and technological power. "New American Talent: The 20th Exhibition" runs through Aug. 21 at Arthouse at the Jones Center for Contemporary Art, 700 Congress. For more information, call 453-5312 or visit www.arthousetexas.org. |
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 Fecundity #4 ... by Marjorie Moore |
'Object' of Their Obsession Proves Inspiring By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin Thank goodness obsessive people such as Lance Letscher, Lauren Levy and Steve Wiman have directed their considerable energy to making art. The three Austinites — all doyens of the art scene — share a fixation with quotidian old things. And all show off terrific new work in Object, now at D. Berman Gallery. Letscher continues generating his beguiling collages of old paper and book parts. But he's gotten a little more whimsical and looser. Now frenzied groupings of vintage airplanes populate his compositions and he even covers a pair of deck shoes with paper scraps inside and out to a delightful effect. After experimenting unsuccessfully with photography, Levy returns to making her rotund, creaturelike sculpture from dozens of old buttons strung on wire. But now she gives them a quirky twist with bundles of old pencils that protrude cartoonishly from the mass of buttons. Would that we all had Wiman's eye for combining pieces of junk in delightful ways — our closets and attics would look so much better. Whether he's stacking old books into an orderly tower or combining scarves and pottery shards, Wiman knows how to make the overlooked look beautiful. But the real surprise in this exhibit is Gladys Poorte. Though she has chalked up just a few group shows, Poorte impresses with her imaginative paintings. Using armatures and fabric, she sets up miniature landscapes and populates them with toys, then renders the scenes on canvas using lush brushstrokes. Vaguely impressionistic, vaguely baroque, Poorte's paintings are potent. They tease with their obscure stories and demand that you look - and then look again. Object continues noon to 5 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays through July 30 at D. Berman Gallery, 1701 Guadalupe St. Free. 477-8877. www.dbermangallery.com. |
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 Willie Nelson by Annie Leibovitz |
Music for the Eyes By Margaret Moser Here's Lucinda Williams on a country road outside Austin, the photograph taken during a visit to South by Southwest 2001. The sky is as moody as Williams' famously mercurial temperament, and the determined set of her jaw reflects it. And there's Willie Nelson, posed like the Indian on the old buffalo nickel, the ripples of his hair waving down his back and the crosshatch of lines on his face as fine as those in a pencil sketch. And here's Lyle Lovett and Robert Earl Keen, college chums as well as peers, sitting side by side, the camaraderie between them palpable. Within the 60-some-odd photographs of hers currently on display at the Austin Museum of Art, Annie Leibovitz's love for music is as apparent as her gift for capturing faces. That is the Connecticut-born photographer's true oeuvre and one of the things that makes her art so remarkable; her portraits are music for the eyes. That element of her work is to be expected. Leibovitz came into prominence working for Rolling Stone in the early 1970s. Her intimate touch with the camera became one of the magazine's hallmarks, and in 1975 she was commissioned to document the Rolling Stones on tour. Moving to the then newly revived Vanity Fair in the early Eighties, Leibovitz continued the broadening of subjects that she'd started at Rolling Stone while continuing her exploration of the human face in a frame for American Express, the Gap, the World Cup Games, and others. Her work collected awards as well as accolades for the musicians, celebrities, politicians, artists, and athletes who populated her world of prints. Over and over in the exhibition, Leibovitz's elegant lens captures character in the faces of artists such as Aretha Franklin, Flaco Jimenez, Pete Seeger, Max Roach, and Ralph Stanley. She is just as comfortable photographing more than one subject, as is clear from the way she renders the Dixie Chicks, each with her own personality, or defines in visuals the closeness between Rosanne and Johnny Cash on the porch of the Carter Family home. Hubert Sumlin and Pinetop Perkins radiate eternity in their long years on this earth as she shows them. Sometimes she turns her magic on places as well as faces. The Stax Studios provide a wealth of subjects the same way her view of Highway 61 is a freeze-frame. Despite Leibovitz's international scope and the fact that "Annie Leibovitz: American Music" was assembled by Experience Music Project, Seattle, the exhibit has a curiously local appeal, in part because some of the faces are so familiar to Austinites, in part because some of them belong to musicians who are (or have been) Austinites. And our own Waterloo Records adds to the enjoyment of the exhibit in Austin with iPod listening stations that allow you to listen to music by the artists photographed by Leibovitz as you contemplate their portraits on the walls. You can also listen to the photographer herself describe the experience of making these images, courtesy of an audio tour accessible by cell phone or even home phone. (You dial up a preset number and extension for each photograph.) Leibovitz's voice is as deep and grainy as one of her up-close photos, yet her love for her work is evident in her commentary – for the shot of Don Walser sitting down to sing at the Broken Spoke, she expresses a wish that she'd gone ahead and photographed him at home. Her description of the session with Dolly Parton says as much about Leibovitz as the arresting photo of Parton. "Annie Leibovitz: American Music" runs through Aug. 7 at Austin Museum of Art – Downtown, 823 Congress. For more information, call 495-9224 or visit www.amoa.org. |
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 Wai Kee – Cultural Passage by Sandria Hu |
Flatbed Press Austin Chronicle My mind, filled with a catalog of images drawn from a myriad of sources, can vividly or vaguely imagine an image. Flatbed Press has contributed heavily to this database for the past 10 years. While Mark Smith, co-owner of Flatbed, and I discuss the current exhibition, "Carlos F. Torralba Ibarra: New Editions," and the changes in printmaking, I am suddenly reminded of a work with the image of an Asian child. Wai Kee – Cultural Passage, a photopolymer etching on color laser copy created by Sandria Hu from Houston, was the first print created by Flatbed that incorporated digital processes with traditional Renaissance printmaking techniques. Consequently, it was Sandria Hu who spearheaded the workshop exchange program offered by Flatbed Press and Coronado Studios to students in the printmaking program at Universidad Veracruzana, Mexico, directed by Torralba Ibarra, the current exhibiting artist. In addition to the gallery space, Flatbed offers artists opportunities to create limited-edition prints in its spacious studio. Collaborating with a master printmaker, painters and sculptors with little prior experience in printmaking can also create single images, such as Untitled (scissors), a monoprint by Sydney Yeager. This impression is printed from a reusable matrix (ink holding surface) such as an etched plate or woodblock. By incorporating hand coloring or other not easily repeatable steps, her monoprint is created in such a way that only one of its kind exists. The advantage of a reprintable matrix allows the artist to further explore her image and to take risks. Other Flatbed artists have put their energies toward producing editions of images. Linked thematically and stylistically, Jack Hanley's Prince, Plague Doctor, and Shaman deliver the unique beauty of intaglio. The matrix made for intaglio printing is etched into a copper plate, leaving incisions that are then filled with ink. The printer places damp paper onto the plate and runs both under the press, forcing the paper into the depressed areas, and thus transferring the image. Flatbed is now offering their first-editioned multiple object. Brooklyn artist Lamar Peterson's Nothin' but Blue Skies consists of two paper-sack lithograph puppets ready for adventure in their cloud-filled magnetic backdrop. The small edition of 24 echoes the artist's larger professional works stylistically. Each impression is equal to every other, and each is a multiple original. When I visit Flatbed, I cannot stay in any given area for very long. While Mark and I move from one part of the space to another, he teaches me about printmaking. We discuss the artists who have influenced our work, the images we dream about, and good books to read. The images created through Flatbed Press and those found in the adjacent studios and galleries are compelling. The space is quiet. It listens for the images to hum. |
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 Lora Reynolds is currently featuring the work of New York artist Jim Torok ('Flower Person,' above) |
Lora Reynolds enlivens the Austin art scene with international flavor By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin Oh yeah. Live Music Capital of the World. A trendy destination for indie film folks and techie geeks. Lora Reynolds was only too aware of Austin's reputation before she opened her gallery in March, smack in the middle of the South by Southwest music, film and interactive media madness. But that didn't discourage her. The 32-year-old Houston native and University of Texas graduate with big sparkling brown eyes figured it was time to jump on the ever-lengthening bandwagon that is Austin's burgeoning contemporary art scene. And why not? A number of professional galleries successfully weathered the economic storm of the past few years. A crop of hip new artist-run spaces sprang up to critical acclaim. And institutions such Arthouse and the Austin Museum of Art continue to build their cred as larger-scale harbingers of trends. Besides -- after seven years of working in the white-hot London and New York gallery worlds, Reynolds rightly realized something: "Why not use my connections to add something to Austin?" she says. "Why not bring art here that otherwise wouldn't be shown?" Art like the obsessively created drawings by Britisher Ewan Gibbs, who spends weeks building each drawing, putting one mark in each tiny square of graph paper. Collectors pile on a waiting list to purchase one of Gibbs' drawings, of which he only produces ten or so a year. Reynolds sold each one of the eight she displayedin May and June. And that was only the second exhibit she hosted in her subdued and intimate space on West Avenue. Reynolds' path to gallery ownership isn't typical. After majoring in psychology, she moved to Houston to pursue a master's degree in clinical therapy. But when it came to seeing troubled patients as part of her practicum, she experienced a rude self-awakening: "I wasn't really enjoying it," she says. Good thing her budding interest in contemporary art was growing ever bigger. Thanks to her now-mother-in-law, art collector Jeanne Klein, Reynolds increasingly delved intoHouston's art scene. And so when Reynolds dropped her academic pursuits, Klein suggested a brief internship with prestigious London gallery owner Anthony D'Offay. Reynolds packed her bags. But after she arrived in London, two months turned into a year. And then that turned into a six-year stint in New York where Reynolds represented the gallery's artists to collectors there. But her ties to the Lone Star State -- especially a deepening relationship with her now-husband, financier Quincy Lee -- brought her back to Austin a few years ago. "I guess knew all along I'd be headed back to Texas," she says with a laugh. Marriage and then motherhood (daughter Georgia is almost two) didn't sway Reynolds from her resolve to open a gallery. She found her West Avenue storefront space last fall; in March she opened with an exhibit of unpublished prints from the Andy Warhol Foundation. Then it was the successful Gibbs show. Currently, she's featuring the beguiling portraits of New York-based artist Jim Torok. Savvy art observers say Reynolds' venture is a welcome addition to Austin. "I think her direction is completely original, totally accessible and takes brilliant advantage of her international art world connections," says Annette DiMeo Carlozzi, curator of contemporary art at UT's Blanton Museum of Art. "I'm thrilled she's part of the local mix." Carlozzi isn't the only one thrilled that Reynolds has joined the local art mob. After living in Houston for decades, Jeanne Klein and her husband, Michael, moved to Austin last year. Longtime supporters of the Blanton, the Kleins purchased two Gibbs drawings from their daughter-in-law for the Blanton. And then Arthouse tapped Reynolds for its board of trustees, while the Austin Museum of Art recruited her to head up this year's Art Ball This fall, Reynolds is collaborating on events with Cinematexas and Glasstire, an online visual arts journal. Collaboration, she says, is the key to getting more people interested in contemporary art: "What I really want is for people to just come into the gallery and enjoy themselves and the art and learn something about it." |
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 Day 1, Afternoon, 4 pm, 2003, by Charles Mary Kubricht |
A grand sweep By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin It's the surprise of the summer. Though it might be surrounded by the rock-and-roll glam of Annie Leibovitz's photos, Charles Mary Kubricht's massive yet coolly cerebral "Scanning the Grand Canyon," now at the Austin Museum of Art, might be the best of this summer's exhibits. Like the best of the 19th-century landscape painters, Kubricht captures the glorious beauty of the American West. But she does so in a distinctly 21st-century way. While rafting down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon, the Marfa-based painter used her digital camera as an electronic sketchbook, documenting the shifts of daylight and the changes in the geology along the 280-mile journey. Back in the studio, she used her digital images to create 13 large paintings (each measures 70 inches by 105 inches) that represent a different hour of the day from noon to midnight. Each painting is made of 49 smaller panels. Kubricht's is not a direct copy of the landscape, though. Instead, it's a very abstract interpretation, each panel an arrangement of rectilinear shapes, each painting a medley based on a different tone -- cream, sand brown, blue, charcoal gray, black -- that represents a different hour of the day and a different place on the river. Then again, perhaps Kubricht's paintings are not so abstract. Spend a moment with one and gradually you discern the folds of the canyon walls, a bend in the river or a rocky outcropping. Arranged in chronological order, the paintings lead you through the course of an afternoon and evening and on down the river. What makes "Scanning" rewarding viewing is its multiple levels. Taken as a whole, the 13 mural-size paintings become a luxurious artistic sweep of the Grand Canyon through the course of the day -- a fittingly majestic rendering of the august American West. But individually, each painting offers something of a more singular and meditative moment -- a means to contemplate the natural landscape as an abstracted melange of shapes and hues. Finally, each panel is a subtle little symphony unto itself -- nature at its most artistically theoretical. About the only drawback to Kubricht's exhibit at the museum (the show was organized by the Galveston Arts Center) is the awkward way the bank-lobby-turned-art-museum is crippled by its architecture: a large floor-to-ceiling barrier occupies the center of the gallery, making it impossible to stand in the middle and take in all 13 paintings at once. Would that one could see Kubricht's monumental work in a gallery awash with natural light and graced by unencumbered views. Still, "Scanning The Grand Canyon" entices and intrigues, suggesting a wholly other kind of landscape painting. |
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 Karyn Olivier |
Karyn Olivier: Winter Hung to Dry Austin Chronicle The back yards of shotgun style houses in New Orleans are generally too small to accommodate the traditional clothesline. Bed sheets on our collapsible, umbrella-shaped clothesline became a temporary fort or a gazebo for a tea party. Pressing my face into the warmth and stiffness of clean clothing, infused with the scent of fig trees, enveloped me in safety. During Hurricane Camille, the delicates, no longer dry, looked like darting fireflies. The pole, dislodged by the strong winds, hit the side of our house like a missile, breaking through 100-year-old brick and wall, pushing a mirror that had been in my family for four generations forward without breaking the glass. We had good luck for seven years. The next morning, we found our underwear in the treetops of several neighbors' yards. We didn't replace the clothesline. Winter Hung to Dry is a site-specific work created by Karyn Olivier when she was working toward her MFA at Cranbrook Academy of Art. "In this installation, I manipulate the familiar – a laundry clothesline," she writes. "This exploration in the domestic converges with my interest in nostalgia. Nostalgia functions in my work through cultural references (memory-based and imagined) and through art historical references, notably minimalism. I overlay the two using the simplicity of minimalist language to trigger a recollection of past cultural norms. In employing the directness of minimalist form, the viewer is faced with an often unsettling and uncanny experience in which the fiction created challenges the realness of the original." Hanging out laundry, a simple act, an eco-friendly act, disrupts modern sensibilities. We reveal too much about ourselves, presenting the inside out of our public selves. Clothes tell stories of the condition and status of our life, of our work roles, and describe aspects of our culture. Olivier is utilizing the sparest means to penetrate the consciousness of nostalgia and perception. Through a simple clothesline weighted with an abundant amount of clustered clothing, unable to undulate, a rebellious core is revealed: that we are identified and marked by our clothing. Today, we are asked to hide the eyesores of our sexuality, our economics, our diversity, and our politics. |
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 Opening, by Jan Heaton |
Makin' It By Jean Kwon Jan Heaton's watercolor paintings might fool the untrained eye. Layers of gossamer-thin brush strokes and translucent washes of bright, vibrant colors give her paintings the facile look of "eye candy" -- they are exceedingly pleasing to look at. But Heaton, a classically trained painter, has found that watercolor is an ideal medium for creating images that blur the line between reality and abstraction, color and transparency, detail and myopia. She takes her inspiration from nature and paints her subjects in unexpected hues, angles, forms and dimensions, making them at once unrecognizable and familiar. Her third solo exhibition is on display at the Wally Workman Gallery (1202 W. Sixth St.) until Aug. 15. For more information, go to wallyworkmangallery.com or janheaton.com. Austin American-Statesman: Tell us about your background and how you got started. Jan Heaton: I grew up in Detroit. My parents were both professional artists (her mother was an illustrator for General Motors and her father was a commercial artist). Growing up, I don't remember having a TV in the house. If it was a snowy day my mother would set up a still life on the kitchen table and give us charcoal, and we would sit and draw all day. It was never a conscious decision to be an artist. It has always been something I just did. I went to Wayne State University (in Michigan) with studio art as my focus. I moved to Austin and showed in galleries for a few years and then got into advertising and graphic design, which I've done for the last 20 years. People ask me if I regret not painting solidly for the past years, and the truth is even though I wasn't showing to anyone, I've always been painting. Why watercolor? I've experimented with all mediums -- oil and acrylic, I've thrown clay on a wheel, and I've done printmaking and ceramics. I am interested by it all and eventually I hope that I can do it all, but right now I am focusing on watercolor. I love the idea that the pigment becomes a part of the paper, the substrate, and that doesn't happen in too many mediums. I also like the spontaneity of it. I use at least five brushes for each painting and I've used bamboo sticks, chopsticks, sponges, rocks, eye droppers and squeeze bottles. Sometimes I soak the paper in water until it's almost pulplike. The pigment can stream like crazy on a totally wet sheet. It's quite fun and sometimes unexpected, almost reckless, and surprises occur! At the same time, watercolor is not an impulsive medium. Watercolor is an additive process accomplished with layers of transparent colors that slowly build to a form, so you need to know what direction you want the image to take. Normally I'm working on at least four or five paintings at a time because when I apply a layer of color, I have to let it totally dry before I can go in with the next layer. It requires a great deal of patience. Where do you get your ideas and inspiration? I am intrigued by the unexpected ways in which something in nature changes, like the patterns of the leaves under my feet on a morning walk or how water forms concentric circles when I look over the side of a moving boat. I like to focus on colors, shapes and details that go unnoticed, like the membranes of a freshly cut lime or the strata of ochre yellows and deep purples inside of asparagus. I do not work from photographs because I don't want to capture literal images. I work from memory and from sketches and notes. I am interested in how people engage with abstract images. It is not always obvious what you are looking at when you look at my images. For example, I have a series of images inspired by anatomical X-rays and diagrams of heart surgery. At my show's opening reception, someone bought the series but has no idea what they are images of. Perhaps they see in them something else. |
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