A step too far

One of the good things about how I work is that I have a hard time deciding when a work is finished. I have a tendency to constantly review and evaluate what I am doing and what I have done. This approach affects much of the work that I created in the past as well what I am creating in the present. Paintings, drawings, etchings, all have undergone the same critical ‘treatment.’ Nothing is sacred. I have always felt that one cannot compromise the entire piece for the sake of a detail. On the other hand there is no reason why a really great detail cannot be reapplied and integrated into another piece. In many cases I build on what came before. I never paint over. I build on the images that preceded. It is also one reason why I began working with collage. The process is like using patches to plug holes. For the most I am pleased with the reinvention. But there unfortunately are times when I wished that I had left well-enough alone. Here are series of how a piece evolved over the years going from spontaneous and energetic to opaque and stilted. And the final result is OK as a piece of art work but I wish in retrospect that I had left it alone.

Pixels Revisited

A year ago I created these first versions of woven portraits I called Pixels. They were made by weaving two similarly proportioned pen and ink portraits together after having cut them into strips. I have added light washes of color to enhance the definition of the features, hopefully without compromising the dissonance that I had originally attempted.

Weaves

In my quest to weave I found a bag full of paper scraps that I had used in other projects . (Me, throw anything away?) Usually in various stages with no specific order I cut, paint and weave strips into

8”-10” squares and rectangles. Adding more washes of color and affixing the pen and ink features I create the portraits. Another source of material came from kids’ (classroom) rejects, mess ups, that would have ordinarily ended up in the trash. I collected them and cut them into strips to be woven as well.

I liked the rawness of the pieces but still something was missing. I had been basically following the same routine for about a year and a half, randomly weaving the strips and adding the features without any embellishment. Then on a whim and in a fit of spontaneity I decided to experiment on a couple pieces adding highlights and color for more definition. I liked what saw and within moments I began to attack entire batch of weaves, all 130 of them. Within a few hours I had finished. It took me another bunch of hours to photograph and upload them. But the results speak for themselves.

Ups and Downs----Tesselations

Ups and Downs----Tesselations

As a printmaker I enjoyed creating repetitive images that are virtually the same but for a few subtle differences. Almost any time I discover multiples I am compelled to organize them in series. I have a shoe box that contains a variety of selected exhibition announcements, some dating back 30 years. I was not sure what to do with them but because there were so many of them it seemed like a pity to throw them away. And I’m glad didn’t because a few days ago I pulled out the box again and decided to play around with them again.
I few years ago I had taken some of these same cards out, cut them up and arranged them into repetitive tessellated patterns just to see what they looked like. I liked what I saw. But then I put the show box away and forgot it, and the dozens of cards in the box.
Recently I pulled the box out again and contemplated the cards with fresh eyes. I made some beautiful little samples with water color and ink and collage. The first two series I created were called ‘Lins’ and ‘Strips’. But then as I studied all of the multiples they reminded me of tessellations and how repetitive images and shapes lead to quite exciting and unexpected patterns. These pieces are some of the results.

Strips

From the same stash of postcards from a long ago exhibit of mine which featured a black and white photocopy of me and that I also used to create the Lins, I thought I would experiment once again with the elements of dissonance and distortion. I am fascinated by how even when using the same components, in this case cutting the photos into strips, I can drastically manipulate the shape and appearance of the image simply by how I arrange and organize them.

Lins

I rediscovered some very old postcards in box that I had used for an old exhibition announcement. It was a small 3”x 3” photo portrait of me that I had had copied in black and white. Since there were so many of these postcards I decided to do some water color experiments on them, creating a series of portraits. Although I enjoyed the spontaneity of the initial results I was more interested in creating the kind of tension that I feel is more engaging. I cut the portraits into for and then mixed up the parts and reassembled them. This diffused element of discordance is something has begun to permeate much of my work both on paper and canvas. It is sense of finding order in potential chaos that I find so challenging.
The pieces are called Lins because my name, Jonathan Franklin, appears on the postcards and l-i-n are the only three letters that remain of my name after I cut out the portraits.

The Genesis of the Collage

About 15 years ago I was sitting around with my kids doing cutting up magazines and doing crafts to make collages. I loved the random, unselfconscious spontaneity of they created. Being the ‘figurative’ kind of guy that I am, my pieces looked like naïve attempts at cubism. At that time I was beginning to feel a little stifled in terms of my own subject matter. Years before someone had suggested that maybe I should bring the background forward in my paintings and have the figurative subject matter recede into it. I was exploring patterning and shapes.
But these collages were entirely different. With their colorful geometric forms they became abstract. I was intrigued and wondered what they might look like as paintings. Unlike my typical nonlinear organic method of painting most of which was by trial and error the subject matter of these collages was already resolved. It was an entirely different process for me. To create the compositions all I needed to do was directly copy the collages. There was practically no thinking involved, like painting by numbers.
And thus I departed into an entirely new direction, leaving my representationalist (realistic) edge behind. At this same time I was also (lackadaisically) represented by a gallery who when I invited the director over to see my new work he was underwhelmed by it to say the least. It was still figurative oriented but abstract and far less literal than what he had expected of me. The result is he dropped representing me almost cold turkey. So much for loyalty.
It took me a couple years to work through this experiment. As the process evolved I found that I was willing to stretch my creative boundaries, to explore a broader range of ideas. In the end my cubist ‘bender’ directly affected how I reassessed not only my older work but how I was able to reintegrate this vision into everything that followed, not only in my painting but in particular my work on paper, almost all of which now involves the use of collage.