Raw materials

I’m traveling right now. I have mornings to myself. So I sit on a balcony with my iPad and paint.

I’ve finished three images this week. It’s amazing how much faster and more dexterous I become with regular practice. In a normal week I get small blips of time to do creative work. It’s hard to make any fast progress that way. But this week has been very productive. I’ve created lots of raw materials for my printer paintings.

I’m still using advertising images (mostly from Uniqlo emails) as a reference image. This started as just a fun way to get reference images…but it’s evolving into something else.

I plan to print these images out, mount them to panels, and paint into them. I like how the image recedes into the canvas and the paint piles on top. I like the plastic quality of heavy acrylic paint and how it mirrors the smoothness of the ink.

I’m saving more in-progress images as I work. I like including the impromptu palette I create while painting. I like those little blips of color. They could be little abstract works all on their own. I like seeing the “bones” of a drawing or a painting. I want to print these, too. Maybe making a diptych with a finished and unfinished image playing off each other.

The brush strokes are both real and fake. They’re “real” in that I made them with my meaty hands. But they’re simulated. The are representations of a brush stroke. When these images are printed, the brush strokes are perfectly flat. They’re just pixels, after all. But there is a tension there between the real paint and the fake paint and the real surface and the illusory surface.

I was thinking about how I might describe this series of work - using advertising as a source and an inspiration. I joked to a friend that advertising is just part of our media landscape and I’m just a media landscape painter.