When I returned to painting, about 10 years ago, I took some watercolor classes with Alix Travis in Halcottsville. She had organized a group of plein air painters that I would try to join up with when I was upstate. The old houses and farm buildings were really interesting to paint and I usually found them more interesting than the landscape. I tried to paint the way light and shadow defined their simple shapes (I usually left out the ornate parts). The distant mountains were less interesting for me and the overwhelming green was hard to define. It would often turn out to be an undifferentiated area of one extra bright green. I looked to the way a couple of my favorite painters, Fairfield Porter and Albert York, painted the landscape with subtle color and seeming simplicity. Not simple.
In the country I was painting landscapes, houses and farm buildings and in the city I painted urban landscapes, sometimes taking classes with the great Nicolas Evans-Cato at Art Students League. We would set up on kind of unremarkable corners of the city and paint the view.
In the winter I’m in NYC mostly and I go to galleries a lot. A few years ago I found myself more drawn to abstraction and really not interested in most naturalistic painting. I decided to make some plaid paintings. I’ve always loved the way colors combine in plaids and I’ve had a fascination with plaid since I was 8 or 9 and had a pair of plaid pants. I think I must have stared at those pants a lot because I remember them so well. For the plaid compositions I googled ‘plaid’ and downloaded a bunch of plaid patterns. These paintings were also an exploration of color, specifically random color. I wanted to use colors that don’t come to me intuitively. I wanted to make accidental combinations and see what would happen.
So for these early paintings I picked tubes of paint randomly, one each from groups of yellow, red and blue/green. I applied many thin layers of color, trying to get some sort of translucent effect. Most of these were painted over old paintings of the model that I’d done a few years earlier, kind of wiping out some of my realist past.
I started focussing on color, taking color theory classes. I’m interested in the way value and hue work together. I did another batch of paintings where I separated the colors into light, medium and dark values, so each painting was made up of colors pulled only from one value and I based the plaid on a book that I saw by Vivienne Westwood and named the paintings for her. From this came the idea of finding patterns or something to base a pattern on in my daily life.
A few months later I was at the Thomas Cole house in Catskill and I was taken with the reproductions they’d done of carpets and wallpaper - the colors were surprisingly vivid and kind of trippy. I took some pictures of a rug I was intrigued with and isolated a flower in the pattern and made a series of 8x8” paintings of it. For color I selected from my giant collection of colored pencils. For each painting I would pull a random colored pencil and then mix paint to match it. Each painting had 4 colors that I would pick randomly but I would try to match the value to the first color used. My goal was to have the colors be so close in value that they would sort of merge into one glowy color. This almost never happened.
After this I started noticing patterns that I wanted to turn into paintings. Sometimes I would create groups of 4, 6, 8 or more depending on the pattern itself and how carried away I got with it. Here’s a list of patterns I’ve done in the past year:
Thomas Cole Carpet
Prague Castle Wall
Adelphi Dots Wallpaper
Mildred’s Birthday Sees Candy Box
Dr Golombecks Wallpaper
My Bathroom Floor Tile
Helen Frankenthaler Painting
Jim Isenmann Ipanema Tile
Marks Bathing Suit
I like treating these paintings as a journal of my wanderings. I like to see what happens if I combine a lot of random colors, controlling the values somewhat in patterns that I notice in my daily life. And the idea of making a large painting from many little paintings also has a part in this.