Painting

Inside out Expectations

With recognizable images, the viewer brings their understanding of how things should look, or what we expect things to look like. I’ve already broken enough of the perspective to force a suspension of disbelief similar to surrealism or a less objective abstractions. By bringing the outside into an interior without the use of a window or doorway, the image becomes a little more curious.

A pink interior is not something one sees every day, so why not! And bringing in all the elements I enjoy playing with. Brushy paint surface (on the pink) dissolving into another plane, a half full glass and the hint of an orange or apple. 2 point perspective grid on the carpet draws you into a cityscape coming in from outside while a window hints at a bucolic garden just outside. Add in a missing sofa just because. What color would you make the sofa to go with the art?

Interior with Conundrum, 2018
oil on canvas
24 x 36 inches

____________________

A variation of blue walls with a tilted vertical striped wallpaper sets the stage for a living room furniture arrangement to contemplate a landscape, seemingly entering the space. The inset painting of a slice of cake seems to be offering the first slice, however it might be from another cake altogether.

Interior Contemplating Cake and Other Distractions, 2019
oil on canvas
36 x 48 inches

____________________

This painting directly creates an itch with the upside down picture on the wall, while the leaning table pushes the bounds of spatial expectation just a little more. A fly has landed in the middle of a piece of paper which hangs in the balance on the tables edge.

Interior with Hairy Arm, 2018
oil on canvas
28 x 22 inches

____________________

Horizontal formats

For the longest time I have been mostly working with vertical format compositions. I think this started with landscapes breaking the landscape format tradition, and trying to squeeze a wide view into a narrow space, requiring a few tricks and adjustments. The same happens with the architectural spaces. So to shake things up every so often I’ll go for horizontal format.

This painting was worked on during the strange election chaos of 2020-21. The large, looming wall with confounding grid makes the arrangement of furniture and rug seem small and somewhat helpless.
Despite the reaction to current events, the painting is a continuation of formal experiments with pace and perspective.

Interior Contemplating the Overwhelming, 2021
oil on canvas
30 x 40 inches
____________________

This painting was begun in 2011-12 and re-worked in 2021. I was interested in the steep oblique angles defining a corner of a room. In person, the space really shifts with the viewing angle, opening up and appearing to follow the viewer as they walk by.
The 2021 adjustments were a re-working of color and adding/adjusting/eliminating elements, while keeping the main angle.

Interior Corners with Shifting Fortunes, 2021

30 x 40 inches
____________________

Interior with Beckoning Expanse., 2021
oil on canvas
28 x 22 inches
____________________

Interior Contemplating Reflection, 2021
oil on canvas
28 x 22 inches
____________________

Warped Interiors

Warping the perspective can be a delicate balance. It’s a fine line between ‘pleasantly disorienting’ and ‘sea sickening funhouse’. Perspective is implied and then expected to follow certain rules. Breaking those rules is fun.

With Interior without Imploding Chair, the chair seems to be folding in on itself against a wall that refuses to go along with the rules.

Similarly, Steep Interior with What Could Have Been flips the floor plane up (carpet seen more from above) while the wall plane and room interior are seen from increasingly lower angles.

Dizzying Interior with Runner shifts the entire floor plane to an angle, which seems to be jostling with the walls to right itself.

Warped Interior with Cupcake seems to squeeze the furniture into the corner of the room. Thankfully there is a cupcake to enjoy.

Skewed Planes and Confounded Perspectives

Tension in an image can come from subject matter, or through formal elements. The use of a painting trope of a knife on an edge of a table pointed askew of the viewer turns a somewhat pleasant, straight on interior into something with more ominous, while the ghosted, unpainted sofa adds to a mystery to be solved.

In both paintings, I find skewing a pattern off of the implied plane opened up the potential for disorienting my expectations as a viewer. The elements don’t sit on the same plane, such as the books on a table, or picture hanging on a wall out of perspective with the wall.

Tensioned Rooms and Subject Hooks

I try to give the viewer many concepts to conceptually grab on to and explore or extrapolate. There is no intended meaning, though the scenes could be reflective of life out side of the paintings. They are not meant to be ‘quick reads’.

In these 2 paintings, the tension is created by the compositional and symbolic elements. I am also exploring scale and proximity in the images.  The distant opposing chairs in opposite corners of a room, with an oversized picture within the picture, painted in a completely different modality and color palette, seem to create an awkward moment.

The Interior with a table demanding the viewer’s attention with it’s awkward position in the room, and elements that are all on edge as if about to abandon their place. They are static elements, bursting with an energy to animate. The inset picture within the painting depicts a person half sitting, half standing on a desk, legs impossible.

In both paintings, I offer the viewer an exit to another room

Paint application mashup

Creating interior scenes from imagination, the spatial representation is my primary interest. In creating the space, I like to mix and match and confound the various approaches to perspective. That is mostly a drawing pursuit. In painting, I’m choosing color schemes, while leaving out an element for the viewer to finish. In the painting process, I find it interesting to switch up the method of paint application. The ‘how of painting’. Some areas are brushed in with syrupy thick paint, while others are scraped or scumbled or glazed or simply painted in.

Wandering Table interiors

Cupcake: Haggle, 2010
oil on canvas
24 x 36 inches
____________________

Reaction: Indeterminate, 2010
oil on canvas
24 x 36 inches
____________________

Dominatrices, 2011
oil on canvas
24 x 36 inches
____________________

Contract: Variations of Red, 2009
oil on canvas
36 x 24 inches
____________________

Pass, 2008-09
oil on canvas
24 x 36 inches
____________________

Bread and Circus, 2011
oil on canvas
36 x 24 inches
____________________

This group is also from the wandering table series. The table with its symbolic elements wandered from an abstract spatial field to a landscape space, to outside of some architectural structures and finally to an interior space. Along the way, the symbols and elements gathered to a picture or mirror or window on a wall, oblique and confounded perspective, and a mystery of the table elements.

Blue Bar: Critical Mass, 2013

Blue Bar: Critical Mass, 2013
oil on canvas
36 x 48 inches

Where to start a story of ones painting life when it has been a continuum is a challenge. I choose this somewhat arbitrarily as it is from a good time in my life. I had been living in the ‘upper’ Tenderloin in San Francisco, working several jobs downtown and teaching in Santa Rosa.

I walked everywhere (except driving to Santa Rosa). My sketchbook drawings were mostly filled with bar drawings, while my studio paintings were of a ‘wandering table’ series. This painting captures both the bar and the table, along the spatial concepts I have been exploring over the years.
Flat and brushy fields of color (blue!) with elements suggesting architectural space.