A New Coat Of Paint

Here Comes The Night!...The art gallery is ready to open

2008-02-26T19:49:00.003-05:00

Please join the artists of 13 North for the opening of the gallery and its inaugural reception on Friday March 7th from 6 to 10 pm, a group show of the founding members. The work covers a broad range of media and subject. Wacky non functional conceptual tables, a 7 foot book, digital images, paintings of all sizes and media. Please stop by for a drink, take in the art, and meet the artists. The gallery will be open full time, so please visit whenever you like, even by appointment (aka with me).

We have been renovating a space for the last couple months and are really exciting about a new venture for this sleepy little town.

13 North is at....13 North Centre Street in Merchantville NJ, just north of Chestnut Street. Please contact me if Google lets you down when you look for directions. And be wary of those famous Merchantville coppers...Always happy to stop you to say hi!

What else can I tell you? Leave a comment and I'll respond. I might even update this blog with new pictures of paintings so check back soon and often.

EJ

A Comment!!!

2007-08-27T09:17:00.000-04:00

Today's comment comes from C.A., a local friend who didn't know how to post a comment (much like myself)...She has always had insightful and heartfelt things to say about my paintings. Pretty nifty huh...I couldn't've said it better myself. So thanks, C.A.

"I have a lot of respect and appreciation for your process. The influence of your passion for environmental studies, geology and evolution make your work interesting. The earthiness, the grittiness, the raw intension and the harmony of color compliment each other well.

I also enjoyed your perspective on how evolution can reflect the transcendance of human emotion. It worked for me!"

Problematica

2007-06-28T11:02:00.000-04:00

Problematica is the name given to fossils that you just can't classify. You could have the oldest rock...the best specimens...and just have no idea how they relate to other organisms, extant or extinct. This painting was made with mixed media, including grout and stain. Some people really like the colors; others don't. I happen to like the colors, which are unique to my work. (I made it in the fall of 2004, shortly after the New Mexico dig, which resulted in many blue and tan paintings)...As usual, I would like to reproduce the general idea but I just can't do it. I wonder what other colors I could try to do it in.

Suggestions please?

Blue With Wax

2007-06-28T10:56:00.000-04:00

I tried in vain to recreate the methods used in "Yellow and Green" and didn't come close. But I did use wax, which was kind of...fun. Using wax, acrylic and oil at the same exact time was a serious juggling act. Little bits of reds and greens come through the final layers. I doubt they show up on this photo.

It was painted in the winter of 2005.

On The Line (mixed media on canvas)

2007-06-28T10:43:00.000-04:00

The blue, yellow, green and white painting below is called "On The Line". What can I say about it? Someone said it looks like a teepee. Great. It is more figurative than most paintings...but it's not a teepee. At most I thought of a sailboat. I think the perspective is a little jammed up. Whatever the triangular figure is, I don't know if it is moving into or through the painting, or to the left or right, along the "horizon". What are the white and blue fields doing? Beats me. Are they at odds? ...

You tell me. Leave comments, please.

Parched (mixed media on canvas)

2007-06-28T10:34:00.000-04:00

The tan painting below is called Parched. I named it on a whim, I guess, because I submitted it to the faculty art show at my high school. Made in the heat of summer (2006), it includes oil and acrylic as well as polyurethane...and probably some dirt and grout. I did apply the heat gun to it a little bit and it was so hot out, the painting actually caught on fire a bit. Whoops.

The leaf in the bottom right corner fell on the canvas as it was drying in the back yard. I swear. I like that it stuck there. It speaks to the tenacity of nature and such. A painting like this made me realize that while I am addressing ideas of permanence and ... non-permanence (temporariness?). It is really the material itself that is in charge of getting this message across, NOT the composition. The new owners of the painting will be fortunate -- or unfortunate -- enough to see the painting change through the years, as other paintings have done.

The needs of the materials, as far as drying is concerned, limit the amount of time I can work on one canvas during a given session. So even my ability to paint is not permanent, despite old fantasies about painting around the clock. I could always set up several canvases the way I used to do jigsaw puzzles when I was little: set up three in a row, mix up the pieces, and put them all together at once.

"Parched" is headed for a private collection.

Turning Rebellion Into Money (Hopefully)

2007-06-05T18:06:00.000-04:00

Second Saturday. June 9th. Reception 6-10ish.

Groove Ground on Haddon Avenue in Collingswood.

I should thank Mike and Chris(and Sarah) for having me again. I think it's my third time showing paintings there.

New works that I can't claim to be a series, plus the return of the glass paintings (the ole tagline was "Imagine painting with a brush in one hand and a hammer in the other"). They seem to be more subdued now, thanks to some newer and more pragmatic (boooo) techniques.

Hope you can make it/will have made it.

I'll blather about the two images I included later on.

The Next Painting, and the next, and the next

2007-01-27T18:52:00.000-05:00

Q: Why are no two paintings alike? "Are you just trying to be eclectic?"

Maybe progressive is a better word, the person who asked the second question suggested.

One reason is that I am too lazy to keep a log of my techniques. So I cannot replicate any method exactly, so I can't make the same painting again.

Because I am self-taught, I don't know how to mix paints properly. So once I use a color, it is used up. There is no real chance for a series based on color to emerge, only color palettes, I guess.

The idea that follows that is the leftover paint I have made: I don't want to waste it, so I immediately use it on the next canvas. This leads to a progression, a continuum of ideas, So the endpoint of each painting is something different.

I think de Kooning said something along the lines of no painting ever being finished. I like to think of that continuum being seamless. A color jumps from one canvas to the next, any element that may emerge is recycled and reborn on the next canvas. A method I have experimented with ends up reiterated immediately.

Overall, like many abstract expressionists, I don't have an idea of what I am going to paint. So if a painting session ends and I like that layer, and I like how it dries (the cold weather is a godsend for letting the paint do what it wants), then I'll stretch that canvas. I've got a general goal, just nothing plotted or drawn.

And that's why the vaguely symbolist paintings starting in 98 gave rise to the techno-collages which gave rise to glass paintings which gave rise to the mixed media paintings, which have evolved into the large canvases of the recent years. It's a macroevolutionary sequence with some transitional forms still evident despite the appearance of punctuated equilibrium (sound familiar?)

Yellow And Green

2006-04-25T15:44:00.000-04:00

It would be hard for me to part with this painting, because it represents a series of firsts. When I finished this painting, I felt for the first time that I had made an actual painting. It also marks the first time I was able to mix oils and acrylics to get an erosive effect, almost like peeling skin, really, but still organic. It may have also been the first time I worked on a painting vertically. It was also totally endothermic, for lack of a better word: I remember giving it so much energy, yet controlling that energy from both close to, and far from, the canvas. I'd give a million dollars to be able to recreate the right combination of materials and sequence of events to allow something like this to evolve again. But such is evolution: a one-time event -- or a one-time series of basically one-time events.
Someone pointed out the fractal nature of it: you can't really tell the scale of the picture. Is it an entire biome or just a section of a cell? This is also something I will focus on and hope to revisit.

Wyoming

2006-04-25T15:31:00.000-04:00

Wyoming is one example of the large paintings I began to make once I moved my studio to my basement, as well as hit a stride using grout and other granular materials to alter the composition of the paint (both acrylic and oil). The title just implies the vastness of space -- habitat -- when I was working on it, as well as the burnt colors of the plains as I imagined them. It resides in a private collection.

Taphonomy Of Rectangles

2006-04-25T15:24:00.000-04:00

One of the oldest paintings on this journal, this painting seemed to take up half the room I painted it in: the 10x10 second bedroom of my new house. The title is fairly self-explanatory. Taphonomy is the study of how fossils came to be and the conditions in which they were deposited. So there is a combination of motion and stasis over time. The mixed media include grout, urethane glass and canvas itself. It resides in a private collection.

Genesis 1:1

2006-04-25T12:18:00.000-04:00

"...Even more so than my fieldwork on digs in New Mexico and Pennsylvania and my lab work at the Academy Of Natural Sciences, my painting is a testament to my love of geology and paleontology. Coevolved disciplines, both science and art are investigations based in both personal and natural exploration in combination with techniques. The works represented by the paintings on display here have evolved from analogies of the fossilized organism or the development of a landscape. “In the beginning…” so to speak, as with any canvas, natural or woven: the paintings form as any depositional environment does, like any ecosystem dynamically recorded by the rock, even following the classic laws of geology. Combining both acrylic and oil paints with materials including grout, sand, dirt and sawdust, I am guided by the biological, chemical and physical processes that produce the natural world, but never intending to reproduce the colors and shapes found in nature. As artist Paul Klee said, “The main thing is freedom…which does NOT retrace the course of evolution.” I invoke geology to re-present human emotions with new artistic techniques. Erosion plays an ever-important role, suggesting anything from loss or change to nostalgia or acceptance, or even the simple passage of time, for whatever that is worth. Following the curve of history, my work becomes influenced by the first painters and their expressions on the walls of caves. At this point, my works may be considered artifacts unto themselves, freestanding records of human endeavor and reflection, a way to create my own rocks, history and nature."

My artwork will be on display through June 10th at Bauhaus Gallery on Haddon Ave in Westmont NJ.