I finished a new painting. It’s called Growing Up So Fast, and it’s a diptych measuring 72 inches wide by 48 inches tall. I’ll post a better photograph of it in the paintings section soon, but here is a series of casual photos documenting its development, with some recent studio notes peppered between shots:

My graduate advisor (whose mentorship I am very happy with, and I’ll call her Martha for the purposes of this text) has told me flat out that she is not a fan of diptychs, so the next couple months may be an uphill battle as I experiment with some paintings that spread across multiple panels. Some of you may recognize the dark blue window-like area as a fragment of an earlier painting. That painting was a 48-inch square, and this painting repurposed that support, along with a 24 by 48-inch panel that was also an earlier painting with which I was unsatisfied. Usually paintings that don’t come to fruition have something valuable embedded in their history — something about them worked, even if the entire piece failed. I am a fan of this history and I like the weight and complexity it lends to the new painting, even if it doesn’t necessarily “read” logically.

My advisor argues that usually there is no good reason for a piece to be a diptych, or a triptych, or any number of surfaces other than one. Her argument is that usually the additional panels are used out of necessity instead of aesthetic intention. For example, someone wants a larger painting so they put two paintings together to get the desired size. I agree with her logic, but I don’t think it is undesirable for a painting’s physical attributes to be partially driven by a necessity dictated by the process of working. For me there is something exciting and helpful about having multiple panels that I can play with, adding and subtracting spaces and seeing how it changes things. It definitely suggests a certain indecision on the part of the artist, but I am comfortable with that; I am willing to “own” it, as we say in art school, meaning that it’s a decision with implications that I acknowledge and willfully accept. My process of working is always a process of figuring out what I’m making as I make it, and I think it important that a viewer can see evidence of this.

In addition to this malleability, I like the rupture, the divide forced by a split surface. I’m realizing more and more that logic is at the core of my interests and my process of working: I am in a constant process of creating logic, undermining logic, and asking a viewer to “make sense” of the conditions of each painting. Splitting a surface automatically induces a very explicit logic of sequence, as in comic strip panels, and also a logic of comparison, which as you can see below, becomes very important for this particular painting.

The figurative image developing here is drawn from an advertisement, and the process over these couple of images is a process of me finding a way to intervene on the logic of the two figures, a way to insert a revision or a supplemental text to this sentimental father/son relationship. I tried a doubling of the child figure as you can see below, but it was complicating the hell out of things, unnecessarily. I probably could have saved some time in the process if at this point I went back to smaller scale sketches to work things out. However, I’m unsure how important it is to save time in a process like this. I probably could have worked through several ideas quickly, though.

I found that I had to reduce things again, as the variables were getting too complicated — the solidity of the image was slipping into a more complicated process-oriented space that wasn’t working for me. Gray is so helpful.

The rest of the painting flowed very well once this flat sky was established as the environment within which to situate the child.

Here is the finished piece:

And here’s a detail (note that the above photo is a much more accurate depiction of the color):

I like this painting a lot; it is simple and complex, it reads quickly as an image but it grows complicated with sustained viewing. This is essentially what I want my work to do — reward the viewer for looking closely and yet challenge their comprehension as they do so. It is not abstraction: you can describe what you see. But the meaning itself is abstracted, creating space out of something intended to be solid and concrete. It creates complexity in something that should be very simple. It is both intimate and detached, “looking at” and “being of” at the same time.

My paintings are a series of very discrete decisions. Go, stop, go, stop. Think, act, think again. The meaning of the work is always in question, and this is the great reward of putting myself through what essentially is a process of sustained confusion, breakthrough, and reorientation: every piece is as fresh a problem as the one before it.

The source materials I’m working from are very concrete images. Mostly, they’re closed, done, resolved. Many of them — advertisements, especially — are well-designed to be concise, declarative statements about the world. Reduction and efficiency.

Images that speak generally are of great interest to me, and in a sense I want the paintings to also situate themselves in a general relationship to culture. The current paintings, many of which involve children, parents, or both, are attempting to keep the identities of these figures somewhat nondescript. They can function like ambassadors for the population of people that they represent. It’s not so much that I agree with the idea that mass imagery is particularly informative or useful; it’s that these mass images set the stage and point to the frame for an ensuing declaration about representation.

Once the stage is set, the magic either happens or it does not. Many times my process of painting complicates the stage to an unnecessary/unhelpful degree; I need to be more conscious of the stage (when it’s set up and done) and prepare sufficient colors or other materials such that the stage can be redrawn and reconfirmed throughout the process. When the armature for the work breaks, everything breaks; the dialectic between ‘image’ and ‘painting’ is irreparably broken, producing an object which is unquestionably a painting. Rare is the instance when this is what I’m looking for.

Collage has never been more valuable because of this; new ideas and images can be experimented with and developed without compromising the main surface. Collage brings its own major formal problem, however: the problem of altitude. Every new layer added to the surface remains an individual component, never fully dissolved into the larger frame. The word “problem” here is neutral; sometimes this building up is a great ally in furthering notions of ‘construction’ and ‘development.’ Other times, the image changes drastically through process and attempts to overpower the altitude modulations, which it simply cannot do. Perhaps the lesson here is to be really sold on the strategy that the collage decision is initially proposing.

I am very drawn to integrations and segregations. Photographs of people holding each other or sharing a moment internally to their own relationship. I like how these images set up a closed circuit; I can extract a father sharing a bedtime story with his son from its original context and place it anywhere within a new frame. Wherever the father and son sit, they are eternally involved in their own personal cultivation of meaning. Their compassionate circle is solidified and it remains fortified, unyielding in relation to other events and atmospheres.

I’ve just uploaded documentation of a new project called Provisions. It is somewhat outside of the discipline that I mostly speak about on this blog; in fact, I went out of my way to avoid writing about it while it was in process as I thought it would be too confusing.

While my artistic practice is, and likely always will be, rooted in a studio practice — meaning, an individual processing of materials into some kind of representation — I have great interest in and reverence for creative production that falls outside of these bounds, spilling into the public domain, collaboration, non-object, social intervention … some of the theoretical expansions of the domain of contemporary art in the last forty years. It’s a treat when an idea or opportunity emerges that challenges me to explore different conduits for the work.

In November of 2007 an opportunity bubbled up to pursue a project that might necessarily involve a more collaborative process: the American Jewish Museum invited me to participate in a group show, “Making Hope Happen,” that focused on the social services and outreach initiatives of the neighboring Jewish Community Center. Each of the eight artists involved were asked to make work that responded to or involved a specific service; I chose to work with the Squirrel Hill Food Pantry, which provides kosher food products and assistance to roughly 500 individuals and families a year.

Knowing that the exhibition itself wouldn’t be open until March, I had plenty of time to contemplate my strategy before diving in. I was initially thinking about how my foundational discipline — painting — might relate to the show’s prompt. Most of my ideas fell flat and heavy-handed … I couldn’t seem to get out of a certain compositional polemic: my ideas were either incredibly didactic and no more compelling than any PSA poster might be, or they abstracted the topic too far from its pragmatic basis and slipped into meditations on art and aesthetics, which seemed less than primary to the core of this entire show.

The friction generated from running into these two walls over and over again eventually pushed me into less-well-traveled territory in my conceptual process, and ultimately the project evolved into something completely itself that, for me, was rewarding to make and functions admirably within its given context. Read about Provisions here.

Don’t feel like reading? Come here me speak! I am thrilled to be returning to Pittsburgh for 40 hours, two of which will be spent participating in a panel discussion at the museum with the other artists from “Making Hope Happen,” moderated by the brilliant Delanie Jenkins. Details about the location and RSVP info is here. Sorry for the late notice.