Paintings that are built up layers of colors, shapes, textures, or gestures - creating a sense of depth into and out from the painting's surface, on stretched canvas or matted paper - presented within a frame.
A series of mixed media monoprints on Canson watercolor paper (18'h x 24"w). Each unique print was prepared with an initial layer of drawing or painting using crayon, marker, colored pencil, or watercolor paint. The print was then laid face down onto the inked plate and either rubbed by hand or drawn onto the backside (or both) to create the rather unpredictable layer of colored ink with its texture. There may be one or more layers of printing ink in brown, black, or gold on each page. The titles in this series refer to the sequence of numbers on a camera lens indicating the aperture size, also called the f stop.
More than an image that is contained in a conventional rectangular frame, seen as if through a window, these paintings are physical shapes in their own right, set apart from the wall with their shadowed edges as a testament to the material presence of paint on a panel. But a tension is also evident because the same painted surface must also give way to an illusion of depth in space. That is the way different colors interact when in proximity. So these paintings begin by first asserting the physicality of the materials but then lead to playful yet carefully orchestrated illusions of space.
The series, "The Four Seasons", was created on salvaged wood door panels that were removed from the church sanctuary of Gloria Dei Lutheran Church, Saint Paul MN, during interior renovation in 2022. Instead of allowing the construction workers to scrap the several 15' tall doors to the landfill, I claimed several of them, and cut down four of them into smaller, nicely framed panels. Stripping and refinishing the outside frame revealed some really beautiful wood - almost too pretty to begin putting a loaded paint brush onto with my artwork intention.
But the final result is a series that recalls the outdoor feeling of the four seasons: Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter. The paintings each took on a different style as they evolved in my studio. The panels have a small frame-within-the-frame as part of their structure, and I used this as a design feature to create a painted counterpoint to the main panel. This was a technique used by Edouard Vuillard in a very large landscape painting at the Art Institute of Chicago, a favorite of mine, in which he painted a floral frame, like a window opening, around the edge of the epic-sized painting.
The Four Seasons has been a favorite subject of artists of all disciplines: visual, musical, dance, literary. It's a mostly universal theme that resonates intimately in the experience of those of us who live beyond the equatorial zone of the earth.
