Oil on linen, handmade frame
48 x 48
This work has great sentimental value to me, as it was created for the only painting course that my wife and I had together while in college at Ohio University (Athens, Ohio).
The great thing about the school at that time was that every painting course, intro to graduate, was focused on theory and concept development and critique analysis and presentation and how you visually executed those ideas, rather than straight technical exercises. There was no hand-holding, and they were taught by significant, established working artists at the time. This major in that pure form no longer exists today at that school.
While at OU’s School of Art, this was one of my earliest serious paintings. Roughly gessoed, then drawn in charcoal, gessoed again lightly to blur the charcoal, then illustrated the forms again but offset with oil. I wanted an echoing effect, hinting at movement. Of course it reflects some of the perspectives I was gaining in my personal life at the time, as well as some of the artists and movements that I was hung up on (Dubuffet’s Art Brut, Eisenman’s Deconstructionism, et al).
After bouts with other methods and media over the years, this line-heavy illustrative approach is something that is still most representative of my design preferences.
