The Series Continues

These paintings are 90"x 65" each, oil on canvas. There are ten in this series now and I plan to make more. I hope to find a space to install them sometime this next year.

Colin Smith

Also while in Chicago, I met up with photographer and musician Colin Smith. He showed me some of his work, mostly self portraits set in his home. I felt like I had been in a similar place before: as a portrait painter, I got stuck with myself as the re-occurring subject matter. However, Colin's photographs are much more successful at self portraiture and documenting daily life than my self portraits ever were. Colin keeps a regular blog of his work.
This gorgeous photograph of cut sweet potatoes on a blue cutting board has the same tranquility and skillful composition of a good Morandi painting. Colin Smith is a talented artist doing some beautiful work, check it out.

Jeff Forsythe

While in Chicago I visited Jeff Forsythe's studio. Jeff was preparing for his exhibition at the Perimeter Gallery which is now up. Many of his paintings borrow compositions from famous Japanese paintings and twist them into his new ideas. I had a preview of the perimeter show where Jeff was showing many small paintings. One image that sticks in my mind was of the The Great Wave at Kanagawa by Hokusai Katsushika painted on the side of a seventies style van.
Forsythe is also making sculptures of cakes in various states, cakes standing, cakes that have fallen and are melting, etc. The cake sculptures are painted with oil and carefully executed gold leaf stripes. The cakes also appear in Jeff's paintings.
We looked at many of Forsythe's paintings and perhaps his most successful to date is "In The Shade Of The Old Apple Tree" painting. The undefined space in this composition created an atmosphere, projecting a mystery to the work and drawing the eye into the painting.

Eye in NY

These pictures are from our Chicago show. Every show was a different visual experience.
Human Eye has a few seven inch records coming out in the next couple months. We also plan on recording more material over the holidays. We may hit the west coast this summer so look out for degenerate mutant rock n roll visiting your town soon.

Brice Marden at MOMA

I went to New York again and had the opportunity to see a retrospective of Brice Marden's work. The show followed Marden's career chronologically from his early minimalist color work through the evolution of his squigily line paintings. The early work is painted with oil and bees wax creating a consistent surface of beautiful, flat color.
Later Marden continued with a more exposed process but still found an equal effect. The work is full of layers of space created by organic line shapes and revisions. I felt a physical closeness to the work throughout the show, like I was inside the painting and navigating my way around. The scale of the work in relation to the negative space is mostly responsible for this absorbing effect. If you are in New York, don't miss this powerful retrospective of high quality paintings.