Afterimage: Sara
2005
65" by 48" o/c
A 2005 work, just recently reworked significantly (this is the older image), using the same principle of spun off mark from the figure. The model is again Sara Graves - you should be able to suss out the three primary poses.
The view is off my studio in Ballard; the specific details are unresolved to emphasize the complex graphic interaction of the gestural and U- shaped marks spinning around the figure "centers."
There is much greater variation in the opacity and precision of the marks - they are gestural in origin but are more carefully resolved; one way to think of these might be a Dekooning with all the classical rules of painting spatiality back in place.
This painting was begun rather casually, but the complexity of the interaction of the marks nearly overwhelmed me as I worked to complete it. The marks have become both spatial and descriptive, gestural and highly specific. It takes me about half an hour to reaquaint myself with the painting before I can actually work on it.
Two Before Windows
90" by 66" o/c
2002 (reworked 2005)
Exhibited originally at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle for my 2002 MFA, I refined this painting heavily this summer, completely reworking the face and upper torso, opening new "fissures" of spatial area, and cleaning up the large vertical marks.
This is the only one of my recent painting to include a "complete" figure, with the model's head totally solid; the suggestion is that as as time passed, only her face solidified in the memory, and the shapes of the room and her body spin off exist in a more fluid temporal space.
A lot of my time is spent stitching abstract planes, figurative marks, and observational memory into a believable if non-specific space. I depend on painting tools to form their own rooms and spaces and even people in a kind of response to observed reality, rather than a slavish visual mimesis.
Available.
Pink Marks of Absence
24" by 48" o/c 2001-2005
This is actually my first painting (from graduate school at UW- Seattle ) involving the style of figurative marks in a perspectival space, and was heavily reworked in the last two months. Only small parts of a pink field from the original show through; it was only this year that I recognized the method to complete it.
Available.
Arctic #2, Oil/panel 24" by 48" 2005
Exhibited recently at the Pratt Museum in Alaska, in a tribute exhibition to artist Alex Combs, a pioneer of abstraction and expression in the Last Frontier, a long-time friend of my family whose work contributed to my ambitions as an artist.
The imagined sea-ice surface, and the darks of the ocean, are highly textured and fairly rich, and the figurative marks are reduced to tiny traces.
Collection of the Artist.
Afterimage: Sara
