Colored Mud

As part of the show I am having this November at the Los Angeles gallery Iam8bit, they asked if I could document the process of making a representative painting. On my own, I’ve attempted to do this but have usually forgotten to actually photograph the work as I got into the painting process. Having an “assignment” to document the process kept the need to photograph each step more present and I managed to capture much of the process. I’ll present the photos and offer a little insight into the how and what is going on.

Once upon a time, I drew the action figures by hand and eye. That took a long time. I now set up the toy on a shelf, adjust the lighting and take a quality photograph and then transfer the line drawing to the canvas. My aim is to create a piece that relies on design and color to carry the impact and spending hours nitpicking over the drawing and proportion takes time and energy away from the good stuff. Shortcuts that make your process work more efficiently without sacrificing something essential are worth taking. Work smarter, not harder…

Once the line drawing is transferred and ready, I layer a color or two to ground the canvas and set the color in a direction that seems appropriate. I am trained as a watercolorist so although I am making these pieces in acrylic, I layer them with a  mind to watercolor and its subtle color vibrations. Thinking ahead, the Obi Wan Kenobi action figure is colored a deep burnt orange and I am anticipating a blue background at the finish. By layering orange and burnt sienna at the beginning I am giving myself the opportunity to layer a blue over those warmer colors later on in the process and I’ll get a little color tension and sparkle from the two opposite colors playing off each other.

I keep deepening the orange tones and add the shadow to start to inform the space of the canvas (also as the colors layer, the line drawing gets harder to see and I need to bring color to the figure lest it disappear under the orange.)

Next step is to flesh out Obi Wan with some basic local color. In addition I start to define some of the shadows on the figures form in anticipation of the next step…

BLUE! I’ve masked off the action figure with masking film and layered a number of different blues to create the tension and sparkle to offset the stoic figure. I lost the shadow as I didn’t mask it off and I put it back in place with a bluer tone which seems to make more color sense with the blues of the background. Its amazing how much more vibrant an orange the figure seems when its surrounded by blues.

Next step is to flesh out Obi Wan with more defined colors and values to give a sense of the light, shadow and form of the action figure. I’ve also softened the cast shadow with some reds to give it a more purple tone. I want the figure to stand out and the shadow to complement that “pop.”

I’ve masked the figure (and shadow this time) again and am reevaluating the blue layer. I didn’t like the way it was progressing as it didn’t seem bold enough as a surface. At this point I’ve invested a lot of time and effort into the layering of the blue and orange background so changing it drastically hurts… but, if it isn’t working it needs to change until it is working. The job of the blue is to support the figure and not distract from it and the sparkle of orange and blue that I theorized would work so well is becoming a distraction so it needs to change.

Peeling off the mask and the simpler two tones of blue with only a minimum of the orange shining through works much more effectively. A few finishing touches on the figure such as adding highlights and deepening the shadows give Obi Wan a more physical presence on the canvas. My initial impulse to offset the deep oranges of the figure with a blue background seems to be a solid choice and I am happy with the results.

I grew up loving the mall. Shoppers World in Framingham MA was a singular destination in my formative years (an architectural curiosity, it was said to be the second oldest mall in America until it was torn down in the mid 1990′s and the dome in the late Jordan Marsh store was reputed to be the third largest (in diameter) unsupported dome in the world!) Malls are fun, full of untold possibility and yes, dastardly in how they manipulate the consumer into an all encompassing need to consume.

In the early 2000′s, I had just finished a few years project that culminated with my first solo show entitled Suburbs. The old saying “write what you know” led me to “paint what I knew” and since I was utterly a child of suburban upbringing it made all the sense in the world to make my paintings about the suburbs. In keeping with my pattern post exhibition, I felt bored with the suburban theme and coupled with a desire to paint something I knew even better, the mall; I happily turned a corner and started the series entitled (appropriately) Malls. For years I had secretly harbored a desire to paint those beautiful strips of box retail adorned with the costume jewelry of signage and architectural branding. What kept me from attempting those paintings until this very moment was an uncertainty that I could pull them off technically. My painting chops, so to speak, needed more seasoning until I felt ready to tackle something so ubiquitous. Now I was ready.

What I wanted was a very simple construct of sky above, strip of mall in the middle and parking lot below and I also wanted to make them big, bigger than anything I’d done before. It was a simple visual equation of 3 elements; sky, mall and parking lot so why wait so long to attempt it? In painting, the fewer elements you have on the page and the more simple they are, the more precise and effective they each have to become. This simplified equation is like explaining something complicated in less than one minute. Each second of that minute become a precious commodity that can’t be wasted. I was nervous if I could pull off the explanation of Mall without a little extra time.

To begin the series, I (happily!) started visiting local Malls. At first I sat in my car with a sketchbook and paintbox propped awkwardly against the steering wheel and started making painted studies from observation. This quickly led to an easier path of photographic reference taken from a tripod in the parking lots of a multitude of malls. This approach created two small incidents with mall employees. The first was at a Showcase cinema and the manager and his pimply faced “thug” came out to challenge me and ask “what was I doing” (in light of Sept 11^th having just happened, their consternation was understood.) I explained myself and my intentions and as the tension eased from the gentleman’s face he related that he thought I was from a competitor wanting photographs to “steal the Showcase brand.” I looked askance at him and couldn’t help myself “your building is a white box with a red Showcase sign…” The second incident occurred in front of a (now defunct) Circuit City where a rather hostile assistant salesperson named Chuck accosted me with a verbal assault summarized in “what the hell are you doing?!” (I remember his name and title because I stared at his nametag in awe of the loyalty he gave his corporate mother.) I imagine the poor guy being told by a manager to “go out there and take care of that terrorist” and I made his job easy by rolling up my window and driving away while he shouted inanities at my fleeing taillights.

Once gathered, the reference material found its way onto my computer and a secondary desire started to flow into the work. I’ve wanted to make my work “contemporary” since I started painting and I honestly still don’t know what that means but I felt that if I could use the computer as an integral part of the process, I would be closer to “contemporary” than not. I started to layer the cultivated images in photoshop, transparently one on top of another, up to eight images “thick” with the strip of mall always registered exactly to the mall below. The concept was that the visual essence of the mall could be discovered and an almost universal mall would emerge with the blending of so many disparate images. Additionally, I wanted the mall to feel rigid and eternal while the sky and parking lot became more transient as we fade through the space. Visual choices derive from your concept and I had a pretty strong concept for this series. The resulting computer images where better than I anticipated and I readily pulled them from the screen and used them as direct reference for the paintings.

The actual painting process ebbs and flows with a rhythm not as regular as a tide but a rhythm nonetheless. Each piece starts loosely with paint flowing organically around a very loose structure. I tend to draw very little at the start and let the paint and color relationships play on the surface and I respond to what is happening with increasingly more precise color and shape decisions. The life cycle of a painting is a lot like our own; the early stages, or infancy, are exciting and full of possibility. The middle stages reach adolescence and real clumsiness sets in as you work through the more precise choices that may or may not lead to maturity. Upon maturity, which for me is a very layered and labored surface, the paint and the concept have started to intertwine and the visual choices you make have a greater impact but if there is a strong foundation it’s hard to really screw things up at this point unless you drastically alter your approach. I far too often make those drastic changes as it’s almost like regaining your youth when you blow up an almost finished painting and you create a renewed sense of possibility. I sometimes call my pieces “little Frankensteins” because they need to be brought back to life over and over as I kill them with good intentions. One of the more important visual aspects of the series: the vertical “poles” that offset the extreme horizontality of each piece came from one of those “death blows.” The paintings simply weren’t working so I took a collaged piece of black paper and glued it right up and down the middle of an early study and like magic; the visual blueprint for the entire series was born. The moral of my painting story is that you can’t really go too far but it’s a shame if you never go far enough.

Logistically, this mall series was scheduled for a show in 2003 at a small museum in Vermont so I had a solid 2 years to move from concept to about 20 finished paintings (10 of which made it to the wall.) The paintings unfolded without crippling drama because when start with a strong concept and do the visual research that the concept demands, the result is work that trends in a good direction. I did struggle with the larger format (42″x48″) and a slight unfamiliarity with oil paint at that larger scale. The skies in most of the paintings suffered a bit because I hadn’t enough visual knowledge to really tackle them as I would want (I have since revisited most of these mall paintings and reworked many skies to a better satisfaction.) I made an oil version and 2 smaller watercolor versions of each piece to varying degrees of accomplishment.

With two devoted years and a large debt under my belt I trucked (literally) off to Vermont to hang the show. The show looked great, I thought, and the opening was well populated but a strange thing happened… nothing sold! My previous show in 2000 did very well so I simply assumed a similar outcome in this case. Looking back I think two reasons kept my selling average at 00.00. First, the mall as living room décor is slightly less appealing than your average painting of say, a Vermont field. Second, people go to Vermont to GET AWAY from the mall!

I have since become much smarter in my marketing and I have found many good homes for most of the pieces from the show. I revisit the series on occasion but have mostly moved on because of the difficulty in selling said Mall paintings. I have limited storage and until a certain series is depleted I’m hesitant to fill my racks with additional paintings. The life of a selling artist demands certain practical sacrifices. Letting go of my devotion to the mall was one of them.