Dear Fleisher

I have two new images to post. I'm contributing both of these to "Dear Fleisher," a fundraising exhibition that I coordinate at Fleisher. I'm going to take a second for an unabashed plug, because this is a really really cool event and if you will be in or around Philadelphia on October 5 between 4:00 and 7:00 p.m. then you should come. Hundreds of artists contribute 4x6" pieces of art to be displayed anonymously and sold for $50 each. Only after purchasing the piece does the viewer learn the identity (and contact info) of the artist. This may be the original source of my idea for doing work in a small format, and certainly the source of the bazillions of 4x6" pieces of drawing paper that I have lying around my apartment. I love it because it raises money for our programs--over $40,000 last time--but is totally within the scope of our mission to make art accessible to people. At $50, it's possible for a wider range of people to buy and own an original piece of art and establish a relationship with an artist. There are more details at our website: http://www.fleisher.org/.

Okay, unabashed plug is over. These pieces are corners of my new apartment--my closet and my stove. I thought quite a bit about paint stroke in these, especially Snapshot #4 Kitchen Corner. I tend to lose myself to color and getting down the details and I forget about brushstroke, which is really very important because it is unique to the medium. Stroke style can capture the feeling of the object being rendered while reminding the viewer "I am a painting." I don't have much more to say about it at this time, but since I'm very happy with the textural quality of this piece, I'm going to continue experimenting with it.

Thanks for those of you that commented. I agree that it is hard to see the images, so I'm working on that. It's always a little hard to post images because they never look quite like the originals. I should point out that I took these images with a camera because my scanner is down, so where it looks like lines aren't straight, it's more because it's impossible to totally flatten the piece for a camera so things get a little out of perspective. I'll scan them soon and then replace these images with the scans.

First Steps

I've created this blog because I'm too lazy to figure out a real website for posting my artwork. Well, that and I also want this to be a place for critique. So CRITIQUE AWAY! Ask me questions! Make me explain myself better!

These first three images are from a series "Snapshots" that I have been working on for the past several months. The first is Make A Rising Performance, the second is Long Beach Island, and the third is Northeast Extension. They are all oil on gessoed paper, 4x6" in size. These pieces serve as my investigation into perception, environment, and memory. I am especially interested in how the instantaneous moment of observation, or sensation, translates into a long-term memory of the moment and environment. This has developed into a style that oscillates between painterly and illustrative. I allow the spatial environment (usually interior, but occasionally exterior) to be softer and fuzzier, while sharpening and flattening the decorative and colorful bits that are sharp in my mind. I try to work from memory, exclusively, but occasionally I work from a combination of life and memory. I've chosen the standard photograph size because I want to juxtapose the idea of an instantaneous snapshot, or capture of information, against the lengthy re-hashing of the moment in oil paint. And, when you hold all the pieces together, flipping through as you would flip through a photo album, the information in each piece is diminished. I believe that looking at all the pieces, so similar in size and format, in rapid succession parallels the way we deal with the immense visual experience we undergo every day: incapable of taking it all in, aware of only certain details. I therefore put the viewer through my own process of taking in and storing information. Unfortunately, this newfangled blog thingy doesn't really capture that part of the experiment so well.