I’ve been making abstract art and painting since the early 1990’s. It’s part of my overall creative rotation between music, mobile sculpture and plein aire painting, all of which can sample on this site. I started out young and wild but have refined a lot of experiments into an evolving collection of controlled methods. Not every piece turns out well. If I feel it’s not going right I tend to wipe it or amplify any good ideas which will reset the canvas. I prefer using dye as my pigment and dwell in the biological color field mixing in different polymers to create pools and lines for the pours to follow. I also like working bigger with abstract. It is a challenge for me to create one base idea rather than several little mini concepts, so this whole enterprise is a life long work in progress.
Rivulets
Rivulets, 28 x 32, fabric dye, house paint, molding paste. I noticed the whole pouring art trend that happened or is happening where you add polymers to pigments that create colorful cellscapes. I was doing this unconsciously for years figuring out strategies for controlling and preserving the marbling and metamorphic effects of colors as they are separate and adjacent and not blended. There are several challenges going on in this piece. First one I call abstract perspective which means depth perception or 1 pt perspective not on a horizon but anywhere on the plane. An example would be a color field lying underneath a pool layer. The result would be the forground looks out of focus or blurred. Another thesis in this work was using molding paste to create puddle areas and lines for the fluids to follow across the canvas like little tracks hence the title Rivulets.
Starscape
Starscape 16 x 20, fabric dye, Elmers’ glue, white house paint. This piece was created as the above piece was drying and I was still not done exploring some ideas. Not sure if I succeeded in said ideas but I do like the piece. One thing I figured out is this canvas size is too small for what I want to do in abstraction. Another thing is the use of Elmers glue as a way to slow down/keeping separate the mixing of pigments.