Studio

Expanse

I have always loved brushwork for its own sake. I love it on Sargent’s clothing, and in Resnick and Guston field paintings. I follow that tradition, but use it in context of an interior space. A floor turns into a wall and dissolves into a swirling void, an expanse that transcends simplified descriptions of walls/furniture/interior. Something about seeing the expected plane turn into the sublime dance paint and brush gives me joy.

Interior with an Opening, 2022
oil on canvas
40 x 30 inches
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Interior with Rifts, 2022
oil on canvas
30 x 40 inches

This painting does hold more meaning for me It is a tearing apart of the cultural fabric over absurd false dichotomies. It is as absurd as fighting over whether a slice of cake or a donut is better.
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Interior with Conflicted Rug and Yellow Chair, 2023
oil on canvas
24 x 18 inches
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Rugs and Carpets

With wallpaper skewing the perspective, the next plane to engage with is the floor. Playing with rugs and carpet design leads me into more options for painterly exploration. Sometimes I want to play with curves and squiggles, or more angles that distort the perspective. It can be a fine line between disorienting and just enough mental tickle. Occasionally it entices me to add a further illusion of sinking depth. That might have some meaning, but I’m not sure I want to go there…

Interior with Rift and Pie, 2021
Acrylic then oil on canvas
40 x 30 inches
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Interior with Lonely Chair and Plummeting Rug, 2022
oil on canvas
24 x 20 inches
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Interior with Conversation Pit Rug, 2022
oil on canvas
40 x 30 inches
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Interior Comparing Options, 2023
oil on canvas
40 x 30 inches
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Interior with Missing Furniture and Art, 2023
oil on canvas
30 x 40 inches
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Interior with the Wrong Color Chair, 2023
oil on canvas
30 x 24 inches
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Interior with Looming Carpets and Desserts, 2023
oil on canvas
24 x 30 inches
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Interior with Possible Equilibrium, 2023
oil on canvas
24 x 18 inches
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Interior with Voluminous Flats, 2023
oil on canvas
28 x 22 inches
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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

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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

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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

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

Studio charcoal drawings

With painting interiors, I’m always having to juggle color relationships and color schemes. And even thinking of how they might look together on a wall (as in an exhibition).  By taking away the color component with drawing, it becomes more about the structure.  I also have been having fun with different ways of applying the charcoal. Brushed on, dusted, rolled or stamped.  This group of small charcoal drawings uses a cutout chair to mask the paper and create the ‘ghost chair’.

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.

Interiors with missing furniture

After some time of inventing an interior space, I chose to use some external references to switch up the feel. Usually I would look through interior design catalogs and then invent from there. I came upon the idea of painting everything except for the chair (or sofa or bed) as a sense of emptiness, and also a play on the interior decorator choosing their art based off of the colors of the furniture. As these are already inventions of interior design, I hope to force the viewer to choose the fabric of the chair to match the painting.