Sepias

Sepias

As young art students a group of my closest friends and I decided to explore an idea that involves contrasts and contexts, between what is ordinary and what is exceptional. One autumn day we decided to paint our faces white, dress in black, channel Marcel Marceau, photograph ourselves,  see what happened. We posed in both urban and natural settings.
There were numerous cameras floating around that day and these particular photos were taken by fellow art student and  'performer' Dana Larsen.  However none of the images you actually see here were actually photographed as you see them.  They are contrived and composed of various components from Dana's photographs.    They are illusions and through the miracle of photoshop I have created my own 'reality.'

Lins

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 high contrast black and white . Since there were so many of these postcards I decided to experiment on them using water color to create a series. Although I enjoyed the spontaneity of the initial results I was more interested in creating more tension which I thought would be more engaging. I cut the portraits into four equal parts, mixed them up, and reassembled them as four paneled collages. This element of discord is something that permeates much of my work both on paper and canvas. It is this 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 Dreads
I have always been intrigued with mops: their voluminous shapes and textures. I had initially used a couple mops on the heads of some home-made scarecrows in my vegetable garden and then I decided to use one of them as dread locks for a sculpture of Edgar Allen Poe that I created for a show celebrating the 200th anniversary of his birth. I called the piece ‘The Dreads.’ Later I found another mop a couple more pieces.
A few months later after having found several more mops I was coincidentally invited to submit some work for a show called 'Shakespeare Interpreted.' The Dreads seemed like perfect foils. Shakespeare's 'Richard III' is about a hunchbacked tyrant who brutally eliminated all of his rivals including his wife and son as he rose and consolidated his power. I decided to portray his victims as 'mop-heads on pikes'.
On the wall behind the heads is one of my paintings titled, "Alas Dear Yorick, I Hardly Knew Ye" in which Hamlet contemplates his relationship with his long dead friend, Yorick, a court jester.

Loners

Sometimes with all my artist reviewing , reevaluating, and reworking work I occasionally commit the sin of overkill. It can happen to a painting if I should paint some out as well to my drawings. In this case I overdid it with a set of large portraits that I had transformed into collages, that I really liked. At one point I tried to camouflage a few smudges that lead to some touching up with paint. As one thing lead to another, before too long the drawings which had just the right amount of spontaneity and texture disappeared. What emerged were entirely new pieces, basically paintings on paper. I literally grieved at what they had become. In an effort to try to reclaim what had been lost I attempted to recreate new versions of them. The results were quite compelling, but nothing like what I had envisioned. Also the original drawings were portraits I made 30 years as I looked into a mirror. I drew a young man. Now, much to my distress and bemusement, what I saw and drew was an old man. Although physically the portraits do not like me, the essence is still present.

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.