Wax Fruit

Interesting to me was that my grandmother always had bowls of wax fruit used as decoration. This painting is based on a bowl of real fruit, but is painted with wax.
Encaustic paintings are created with pigmented wax applied in layers. Top layers are fused to underlying layers with heat; usually a heat gun, propane torch or iron. Check out Joanne Mattera's blog. She is a quite well known encaustic painter.
This painting, "Wax Fruit (Nectarines)" is 30" x 40". Click on the image for an enlarged view.

Yum!

I really like encaustic paintings!
I really like pizza!

Sometimes painting is just plain fun!


Click on the image to enlarge.
("Pizza", 2007, encaustic on canvas, 30"x40")

Artist as Viewer

If you'll read down a couple of posts, you'll see that I use an infant as a metaphor for a work of art. Of course I was relating this to the experiences of a diverse viewership with an art piece. But that metaphor works another way for the artist. We are glad when a piece sells. But this oil on canvas painting of our local Methodist Church (2008, 24"x 20") sold before the paint was good and dry. And as such the photo I have of it is kind of blurry (my camera was on the blitz). Sometimes I like to experience a painting I've done for a while before I let it go. Maybe, after being the artist, I need to impart meaning to the painting as a viewer.

Good Ol' Barney

I rarely paint celebrities. Too often the focus becomes the subject of the painting rather than the painting. When I say the focus of a painting should be the painting, I don't necessarily mean technique, but in a sort of Clemente Greenberg way I mean its formal properties - you know, surface, support, paint, size, texture - all that sort of stuff. (Yea, I know, Greenberg would have hated this painting.)

Don Knotts was a master. For all his inanities, he was able to switch and pull off an emotional and melodramatic moment. John Candy could do this also. I, personally, have never seen Jim Carrey do it convincingly.

This oil on canvas is 20"x16" and painted in 2005.

Abstract vs Nonobjective Art II

David Hirschi makes moderately sized seemingly monochromatic paintings "without referents outside of paint, color and support." His paintings arguably meet the definition of nonobjective art. But, as a viewer, some of his blue paintings remind me of skies at certain times of the day and year - an abstraction of some reality. I, in effect, have made a nonobjective painting abstract, without even touching it! In this sense the idea of abstract vs nonobjective art becomes more than academic. A work of art is not complete until the viewer interacts with it. Since many viewers may interact with a work, a particular piece is always in process. Another way to look at it is when a work is finished by the artist, the work is as an infant. Over time the piece matures as a viewership responds to it.

Mark Grtojhan is well known for his colored pencil abstractions which he often subtitles "Butterfly". This 2006 encaustic on canvas (30"x24") is an homage to Grotjhan (my intent). So is this painting an abstraction of Grotjhan's work, an abstraction of butterflies or nonobjective? You decide.

Abstract vs. Nonobjective Art I

I am mildly nonplussed when one of my art friends corrects me while discussing abstract art. The preferred term, I am informed, is Nonobjective Art. As I understand it, abstract art, as we know it today, arose from late 19th century art movements and initially represented varying degrees of deviance from representation of real objects. This, in contrast with earlier ideas of art which held in high regard exacting verisimilitude in painting, often drew the ire of art critics and collectors. As the art form developed, abstract art became increasingly independent of reality - to the extent that in some works there is no recognizable reality. This is nonobjective art. But even this becomes problematic as we'll consider in a later post.
The two paintings here are abstracts. "Larry, Daryl and Daryl" (2007), a 20" x 73" encaustic triptych, may be considered nonobjective. "Kiss in the Forest" (2008) is an abstraction of reality. It is oil on canvas and 30" x 40".

Getting Started

Me a blogger? Never. I don't really read many blogs, not even art ones. Too many lame opinions and unsubstantiated fictions passed off as fact for my taste. But a friend in the business (a great encourager actually) has convinced me that I too can join the world of blogging. So get ready for lots of lame opinions and unsubstantiated fictions passed off as fact - and a sampling of the art I make as a means of avoiding insanity.
This painting titled "Diplomacy" from 2003 is actually a self portrait in which I acknowledge 'my other self' and that, for the moment, we are in sync. This oil on canvas diptych is 36" x 48".