Copper Paintings |
Drawing is My Bedrock |
Push Pins Paper Planes ▼ |
Metaphor Illusion Reality |
Three Way Vanitas |
PUSH PINS AND PAPER PLANES: A MID-CAREER SKETCH Catalog essay It is late morning in Longmont, Colorado. In a tree shaded neighborhood of comfortable old homes that gives blessedly few hints of the surrounding region's headlong sprawl, a fortyish man sits alone in a high-ceilinged, white room. Of all the daylight hours that permit him to work, the two before noon are perhaps his favorite. Dependable, unsentimental north light falls upon a painting easel and a table just to its left. Upon that table, a meticulous arrangement of things that not one person in a hundred would label "objects d'art" With a student grade, number 1 synthetic brush poised in his hand, he concentrates his considerable powers of observation upon one of the items on that table, a small rectangular block of Styrofoam. Styrofoam! How various and strange still life painting has become since the sumptuously laden tables of the 17th century Dutch painters Kalf and Hecla. Of such improbable things do the Muses sing to one of the more prominent practitioners of Contemporary Realism. A partial but representative sampling of this painter's inventory of precious miscellany might include paper cups, plates, and bags, odd bits of string, masking tape, bubblewrap, carpenter's rule, animal crackers, dried fish, sheet music, butterflies, beetles, birds' nests, and bones. |