This is my first August post. I have spent the last two weeks doing the social part of the artists' life and starting new projects. Last week I spent two days at the Kah Bang festival in Bangor, ME, where my friend Julie K Gray had some incredible work up. I met some fantastic people, made a few connections, and had a lot of fun providing support for one of my best friends. I also had an opening in Laconia, NH at The Studio which was the kick-off of Speakeasy Dining, the unveiling of what amounted to the largest painting I had ever finished, and a Walter Mitty music show. Since last week, I have been mulling over a new project, doing the legwork on a project whose final results I know not of, and slowly trying to finish this large scale commission that it now feels like I have been working on forever. Socially I have been grasping at straws trying to figure out why I feel a little off. Last night I forced myself to be quiet and work. I am not sure that that is what I want, but it may be what I need.
Enough of the painting of the interior of my head though. Lets get to the nitty gritty.
The following are three photos of the installation I did at the studio. This was by far the most people that I have drawn in the past ten years or so. I really got into the floating heads and a couple of the hands. Bodies still kind of bore me.
Here is the whole panoramic view of the piece, though there are some better photos of it up on my tumblr page re-blogged from my friend Matthew Best. That link is over
here. I make absolutely no qualms about being an awful photographer. I am just far too impatient to manage it.
The following image is a detail of the large commissioned piece that I have been working on for the better part of two months now. It is coming along quite well I think. I am slowly getting to a point with a paint brush where I can create some of the same differentiation in s forms that I can with a bic pen. This is great because the black paint is immediately recognizable as a dark on wood panel. It also helps me increase the size of the smaller Vertical Series Panels. If you do not recall what those looked like, you can see some in my
More Partitions post or in the
Billboards post.
The full Vertical piece pictured above is the next step in the series of Square foot pieces that I was doing by joining several vertically composed pieces of wood next to each other. The same adding and subtraction is being used, but this time on one panel. I am not sure that I love this piece yet, but it is getting there, and since the entire series is about that adding and subtraction that happens naturally in painting, I do not feel married to anything depicted in the image anyway.
Lastly, I've been producing more blocks. I am keeping them in sets of monochrome colors. I have big plans for these, but I am not quite ready to share yet. Lets just say that I am happy that my thesis taught me how it was possible to hang them, but that my thesis did not get at many of the compositional areas of spaces that I was interested in addressing with them.
There will be more to come soon. I am in a good spot right now. After a two month period where art felt like a job that was grueling and thankless, I am starting to feel the pull of the studio and solitude again. I have lived my life trying to reenact various dreams that I have had. Sometimes when I fall short of these dreams, I begin to wander and lost track of what it is that I do. Hopefully I am done wandering for a bit here again.
Talk to y'all soon.
Peace
-Mike
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