REMNANTS

I have always viewed my work as ongoing conversations, as works in progress and therefore always susceptible to change, sometimes with a capital C. As a writer might find him or herself constantly editing words over time, so too do I as an artist. I feel compelled to return to my work not only as a point of reference but as a point of departure as well.
I had accumulated dozens and dozens and dozens of drawings over the years: pencil, pen and ink, water color, acrylic, all works on paper. Some I felt were resolved but others, in spite of all the years, did not age as well, or at least my taste had evolved and I was not satisfied with what I saw. During the past 10 years I had begun experimenting with collage, initially cutting apart older etchings, and then some of my drawings as well. But about 6 months ago I decided to try something completely different. Instead of cutting works apart and then reassembling them again with glue I decided that I would tie every part together with a three inch piece hemp string. I call the drawings Remnants because they were assemblages made entirely by tying all of the ‘remnants’, the disparate parts, together. I completed all of the pieces in a fit of creativity over the course of one month, and discovered that the sum of all the parts makes each piece whole again.

Many years ago the owner of high end, period furniture store and gallery stopped by my studio for a visit. Although he enjoyed my work he thought that an exhibit of paintings would distract too much from the store’s focus, the furniture. As he was leaving the studio he noticed a painted figure hanging up in the corner. It was a piece that I had cut out of a painting that was damaged after being accidentally torn. I ended up cutting up the canvas into smaller canvases but kept whatever figurative fragments that I could. I initially dismissed the piece as nothing consequential but he said if I had more of them maybe we could build a show around them and hand them up around the furniture as installations. And that was that.
I eventually created a whole gallery of these figures that were suspended in different configurations amidst the furniture and all over the gallery. It was like walking into a theater full of the actors `in tableau. After the exhibit closed the question was what to do with all the pieces. They were too big to place in file drawers and to flimsy to store upright so I decided the next best place would be to sandwich them between the beds and mattresses in our house. And that’s where they remained undisturbed for the next 20 years.
A couple months ago, I decided to revisit them and discovered that that some had not aged well, some were in need of repair, still others were in reasonably good shape. I was going put them away again but then it occurred to me that, in actuality, these pieces had actually anticipated my work with collage by a good decade. In many cases I had glued various pieces of canvas together to create collages. Suddenly I began to see these pieces in a new light.
I brought them all down into my studio and began to repair, repaint, and rework each one, not really knowing what I would do with them when I finished. I just knew they needed some new ‘love’ after so many years of being hidden away. I ended up building some bases that allowed me to set them up as freestanding pieces and within a short time my studio was becoming more and more crowded as more and more figures began to assemble.
I call them ‘Walk Abouts’ and for now and for the time being, and for the sake of my very limited space I have suspended them all together on a clothes line. And there they will remain until a new venue finds them. It’s better than being sandwiched under mattress any day.

A few years ago I had the opportunity to design the set for a production of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's 'Three Penny Opera' produced by Paul William's Chicago Opera Group. We had the usual budgetary and stage limitations to contend with. The set needed to be light and portable but edgy at the same time. I built a 10' crucifix that doubled as a clothes rack, a 10' gallows, a 10' long fence, a large shuddered window that opened and closed as well a door and door frame. But the most memorable pieces that I built were the a series of 8'x4' styrofoam panels based on pen and ink drawings by George Grosz, the German Expressionist, who was commenting on the material excess, greed, decadence, and debauchery that he perceived was so pervasive in undermining society at the time of the Wiemar Republic in the 1920's. The panels served as backdrops that were moved around on stage in various combinations. On their reverse sides they were painted as black brick walls which when lined up together were quite convincing.

The Meandering Life of a Painting

The Meandering Life of a Painting
Whenever I believed that I had ‘completed’ a painting I would engage in a ritual that I practiced for well over thirty years. It required that I set up my heavy free standing masonite panel somewhere in an evenly shaded patch of ground, drape a black cloth down the front of it, bang a nail in the center, hang up the painting, and sometimes enduring a full range of weather conditions, snap four Kodachrome slides and then repeat the entire process with a role of Kodak 100 print film. It was a tedious sometimes arduous process that had me constantly battling the wind and flapping cloth panels, or snipping away frayed or errant strings of canvas. I could really have used an assistant. A week or so later I would get the pictures back only to discover that the images were flawed because I forgot to adjust the camera properly.
And then everything changed over night with the advent of the digital camera. Actually I was a bit of a slow learner. I still persevered with my traditional set up, slides and prints until I could no longer find people to process them any longer. Suddenly I was left with only one choice : the digital camera. What surprised me above all else was easy life as a photographer suddenly became. Suddenly there was no need to set up anything in order to photograph the paintings. I could shoot pictures virtually anywhere and then crop them and make other adjustments on the computer. If the picture was flawed I could easily rephotograph and upload it in moments instead of weeks.
Since the early 1980’s when I moved to Chicago I had diligently been documenting my work. As I had said earlier whenever I completed a piece I would try to photograph it. However in almost every case I would no sooner see the slide than I would detect some compositional flaw that needed addressing. Once correction would reveal the need for another correction and over time completely new image would evolve and on and on, With all the changes and constant rephotographing I began accumulating hundreds and hundreds of slides that marked the progression of virtually all my paintings.
Although slides are wonderful, they are useless without a projector. And that’s why I have decided to digitize them.
These images that you see represent of a few but by no means all of the stages of development of a particular painting that I've been working on off and on since 1985. You can see how the image has twisted and turned over the years. Ironically as I revisit the various stages I feel a tinge of regret at having painted over what looked to be a perfectly fine painting. Yet regardless of how good or bad they were, the bottom line is that the current painting would not exist without having made all those earlier stops along the way. Although many images are now buried and invisible under the layers of paint and color, they thankfully still exist digitally and as slides, and like life, art goes on.

Photo Collages: Unknown Identities

A number of years ago on one of my daily alley junkets I came across an old cardboard box next to a dumpster. It was full of cards of some sort but when I picked one up I discovered that it was an old photograph. As it turned the box was full of photos that someone must have thrown out. They may have come from an old photo studio.
The pictures, themselves, looked as though they were from the early 20th Century. All were black and white and sepia, and the thought of them being tossed into a landfill or destroyed in the rain was too much to bare. So I brought the box home and stashed it on a shelf until I could figure what to do about them. I saw them as time markers that needed to be protected. I thought donating them somewhere.
But over time as I would study them I began to see them differently. I had already begun to cut apart many of my old etchings and drawings and turning them into collages. Why not experiment with these photographs as well? At first I was tentative. They were quite valuable (at least to me) and fragile after all. But the more I cut the more interesting the results. I literally mixed and mashed parts and pieces of photos of people from different periods, genders, and ages together to create entirely new and strange identities.

Woven Prints

A couple years ago I had somehow gotten it into my head that I should print up some giclee (art) prints. I figured that people would be willing to spend $25, $30, or $40 for an art print of a painting rather than several hundred or even a thousand... dollars for an original. That was the idea. In theory it sounded good. I had done some research and thought I was making a sound decision. The long and the short are that I ended up spending a huge bundle of money. Needless to say, the results were hardly satisfactory. I was so disappointed and frustrated by the way they looked and by the whole mess that I couldn't bear to even look at them. Just seeing the box of them stashed in the corner of my studio reminded of yet another one of my misbegotten artmaking misadventures....until a light bulb went off in my head.
As someone who is committed to recycling, regenerating, and reinventing things it suddenly occurred to me that there might be life in those dead prints of mine after all.
Armed with a pair of scissors I decided to make some major alterations. It meant that I would literally have to cut the prints apart, cutting them into strips. Then weaving them back together they became transformed into something entirely different and quite exciting. Diffused and abstract yet still recognizable and accessible, they reminded me of seeing objects through a distorted panel glass. I now have over forty of them and each one is a slightly different variation of the same theme.

Six months have passed since last I checked in. Lot's of new work, a new website. Where to begin, where to begin?