About The Art And About The Studio . . .

This is the best I can describe it so far. All I really know is, I get “notions,” which I’ve described elsewhere, various ways, and when I chew on them, sometimes for a few seconds, sometimes for months, I think some are art and some are not. Some of this is in my new artist’s statement. If they are going to be art, it happens in my hallway — which is my studio. See below.

My hallway studio may be 27 feet long — long enough to easily handle two of my 12-foot canvases at the same time on the main wall — that’s the size of my large works — but it’s only 3.2 feet wide, so every photograph of the studio or the art has to rely on a wide angle lens. Which can distort, as evidenced here. So there’s a story behind how I finally take the real photographs of the art before shipping them to the gallery (ENGAGE Projects Gallery in Chicago).

About The Art

Someone once said to me, “your mind’s like a honeybee, you go from flower to flower, and when you’re done you go make honey, like no one else.” That’s the art, at first, before I work with it, as I describe above. And as I describe, some executions take just minutes, with oil sticks that snap, my hand that cramps, with blisters, with sweat. They are exhilarating and I’m exhausted when done.

Other executions take weeks or months, layer after layer painted in oil, sometimes sanded and repainted. These are more meditative — I lose all track of time, there is only my hand and the paint. For these, I make custom brushes and hold my arm at unique angles — my painting hand, my left hand, shakes uncontrollably from 20 years of lithium. I don’t paint letters less than three inches tall now. The painting is slow — sometimes an hour a letter. Look closely and you’ll see an unintentional signature in my paintings — brushstrokes that record my shaking hand, its pressured up-and-down, its shaking left-and-right.

I intentionally place almost imperceptible flaws in all of my paintings as another signature, and because it represents who I am as a painter: I was not an art student, and I did not learn fine art techniques. I learned how to paint on old houses, with a different kind of oil point. I have a funny story about that.

About The Studio

The notions come any time, and all-nighters can’t be stopped when the art comes. I need my studio with me all the time, canvasses ready to go. So after my first juried art fair, in New York, I came home, put anchor bolts in the plaster, and turned my 27 foot narrow hallway into my studio. See photo above. I love it. Between my methods for catching and organizing the words that come out, and the hallway, I have ways that I love to go from first notion to executed work — in the right medium and size that’s the right fit for the piece.