Progress - Man With Stripped Shirt

Worked on the stripped shirt, trying not to paint each stripe one by one but working the whole thing at once.

Detail

ford sketchbook

 Here's a close up of the 'over worked' piece . . . 

A few variations of toner transfer of the ruddy duck using spray paint.  

Working with the transfer again, using images from one of the current wars with the questions: 'who could love you more' and 'how could you love more.'  I have been thinking of the soldiers who are willing to sacrifice their own lives for others, while fighting individuals who believe the exact same thing, but from the opposite perspective . . . 

 Same question paired with imagery from the Vietnam War. 

 A complete set of letters cut from masonite. 

white

This is a 4x4 piece with a bit of stenciling and flat white. The text says "over worked" which says something about how I feel these days and also says something about how I feel about my work recently . . .  

This is an example of the stencils used in the piece above. It is a complete set of letters and numbers.  

I'll post some more pages later

monster

Here is a shot of Ethan rockin' some monster drawings with his tongue out. You might notice the magnets he is using as eyes on the tallest monster. The other day he drew a box around one of his monsters and said it was a monster in a jar. Crazy stuff .  . . 

More White Paint

Admittedly there is a lot more to work out with pushing back imagery whether it's using white paint or any other method. But the experiments and results from the past evening were engaging enough to encourage me to try this on something larger with an image rather than just texture.

The panels were originally set with binder clips on the floor to apply the paint as illustrated in the first image in the post. However, it was difficult to apply the paint well working hunched over so the entire configuration was lifted into an upright position to continue.

Unlike the experiments this panel did not end up with a  relative all encompassing coat of paint. It started off that way, but as the paint began to set I could tell that not much of the original image would show through if any. So out came a few old t-shirts and water to remove some of the paint. The evening was spent adding, removing and diluting the paint to allow some of the past work to remain while still toning back the majority of the configuration.

Here is an illustration of the potential of this sort of activity, a stronger contrast between panels when rearranged. There will be a lot to consider with this moving forward. I want to be aggressive with my painting at times, but currently I hold on too tightly to the work that I have done to cover much up of anything. Moving beyond this will take more time and panels, but in seems clear that in order to make the work more engaging something has to happen. 

White Out

With more panels visible in the studio everything seemed to be heavily color saturated to me this week. Almost out of the tube saturated. So in an effort to inject some subtle color back into the panels I experimented with applying white paint back on top of some panels in both a opaque and semi-transparent fashion. In the image above the configuration on the right have more of an opaque application while the one on the left is a mixture of white latex house paint, water and matte medium. 

More experimentation will have to take place in order to not only tone back color but to preserve some of the past work. Ultimately it would be beneficial to the work if images and texture could be obscured while still peaking out in bits and parts of the panels.

Brushing Teeth

With the studio rearranged to provide more floor space quite a bit of time was spent moving panels around. This combination using portions of three representational paintings seems promising. The true randomness of the combination seems to provide an image that appears spontaneous and found as the figures don't necessarily seem to visually relate in terms of space and scale to one another but certainly hang together as a compostion.

Studio shot of the increased floor and wall space. Against the back wall is the image from above with another panel added to it.