Hello from Madrid

Greetings from Spain! I arrived May 28 and will be in Madrid, Sevilla, Granada and Málaga the next two weeks. Then I’ll fly to Frankfurt to see friends I met decades ago at the University of Mannheim.

It feels good to travel abroad again, a year after contracting a heart infection while in Peru. My heart continues to get stronger.

Spain is wonderful and I’ll write more about this trip in the next blog. This month I share exhibit news, my newest work, and some contemporary artists whose work resonates with me.

My July Exhibition at Forever Florida Gallery

In July, I’ll be the featured artist at Forever Florida Gallery, 2629 Central Avenue in St. Petersburg. I’m grateful to artist Wasil for the chance to exhibit in this very special space, which he has cultivated the past few years with a wonderful selection of artists and cool events. Opening reception will be Saturday July 11 from 5-9 pm. That’s ArtWalk night in St. Petersburg!

My Process

People often ask how I started making visual art. It wasn’t planned.

In the summer of 2019, while I was in treatment, my early life experiences, traumas and emotions began emerging into drawings, montages and collages. I healed emotionally, but the creative process never stopped. The ideas and images still come, seven years later.

The techniques have changed, but the process itself continues to push me forward. It’s pushed me to learn different techniques, and the techniques have given me more capacity to create.

I don’t have a formal art education, but that may be an advantage, as I learn technical things in service to my own creative language and process. Early on, a mentor discouraged me from taking drawing classes, for example, unless I wanted to become a figurative painter.

“You create compelling art,” he said. “Don’t mess that up, just keep doing it and technique will come in time as you need it.”

And so it has.

The biggest changes in my work have been the use of spray acrylic and a willingness to be messy and less polished (at least some of the time). Out of that comes a lot of interesting material.

Some pieces are complete as is, a whole painting. But some are more interesting cut up and rearranged or combined with other material. And sometimes the material used to make a painting becomes the painting; the stencil becomes the more interesting thing, the byproduct of my process.

And although these “extra” pieces may be the byproduct of my process, they are also the voice of something beyond me. If I limit myself to only what I can imagine before beginning, I miss the magic of creation, when something unexpected emerges.

Mob

This started as a stencil and turned into what may be my most audacious work yet. The black holes are not at all regular; the mat board is torn and imperfect around many of them. Much of the surrounding painting appears black, but on closer inspection there is a lot of dark blue along with black and some amorphous grey clouds.

The… figures? lights? spirits? unknowns? … are bright yellow glows in the surrounding darkness, with their own black holes.

Where is darkness, where is light?

A Mysterious Place

I had an idea, one I’ve played with a lot lately, of a series of rotating boxes inside boxes. But after beginning this piece I started freelancing, adding semicircles and inversions and playing with colors. The result is, once again, very different than what I planned, and a lot better. At the offset center is a small cube of light in its own enchanted world.

Longing for Spain

I worked on this final piece over several weeks last month, preparing the panel and applying background color.

I had only a few days in the studio after coming back from Ottawa and leaving for Spain, and I didn’t think I had time to finish it. But once I started it was done in two more days.

Longing for Spain is an experiment in intentionally imperfect repeated patterns and shadowing of forms. What emerged, and what I could not have predicted, is its warmth, dimensionality and movement. When I posted it on social media, I accompanied it with music from Miles Davis’s Sketches of Spain, the monumental jazz album he released in 1960.

Music is never far from me. Sketches of Spain and Kind of Blue (1959) are two Miles Davis albums that influenced me greatly when I started playing jazz.

Click on these new pieces to see them more clearly on my website, and to check out all my work and previous blogs.

In Dialogue with other Contemporary Artists

I’ve been exposed to the work of many young, primarily New York-based artists through Jason Hackenwerth, the creator of Sixstar Art Studios. It’s exciting to see contemporary works from much younger artists that resonate with my own experience and creative process. Here are two.

Jack Arthur Wood Jr.

Wood creates complex, dimensional works that include paint, print, drawing, cloth and found materials. Jason suggested I look at his work when I first joined Sixstar, because at the time I was primarily a collage artist. There were similarities in what we were doing, although I was mostly using photos in my collages. I’ve moved away from photo collage in recent work, but I continue to use abstract collage and find inspiration in these works.

Here is a picture of two Wood pieces I purchased: above is Floor Door Sky Door (2020), below is The Ridgewood Reservoir Wearing Grey Spring Morning (2021). They hang in my bedroom.

Wood’s website is https://jackarthurwood.com/

His work is also available through Chart Gallery

Sam Branden

Branden uses painting, threads, textiles and found materials. With them he builds dense, stitched compositions. Stitching and seams, and mesh spandex, play key roles in the works that reflect contemporary urban life.

You can see his work at Chart Gallery and at Good Mother Gallery

Wood and Branden were both featured in Chart Gallery’s 2024 group show Facture Fracture, along with Kadar Brock and Shayna Miller. Here is a link for overview of the exhibition:

From time-to-time I will share other artists I like.