New art over the past few days

Over the past few days, I've been getting some good work done.  By "good" I mean both satisfying and educational.  And the paintings are beautiful to me.  According to this video, that means one of two things:
either a.) I possess virtuosic skill,
or b.) I am not evolutionarily viable.
Given that I've already bred, I guess that means I'm awesome in either case.

This is another TED talk.  I watch these a lot.  Watch it.  It's worth your time.
 




Anyway, back to me. These photos are of a t-shirt I stretched between two wooden frames.  This gave the fabric enough tension to support the weight of some paint without sagging in the middle, which would cause the paint to form pools.  Then, to keep paint seeping through the fabric to get anywhere else, I taped a large piece of aluminum foil to in the front inside portion of the shirt.  Then I taped up the rest of it under foil on the back so I wouldn't get paint anywhere but in the magic square I'd made.

For this piece, I used one of my three favourite tshirts.  They are identical.  I bought one a couple of years ago and liked the way it fit so much I bought 2 more the following week.  I wear these shirts constantly, so they've been pretty much everywhere I have.  These shirts have painted with me, slept in my bed, gone to work, and held my son.


I wanted to keep the black background intact for a few reasons, foremost of which is probably simply comfort and wearability.  A close second though was that this was (as it always is for me) an experiment.  I wanted to see if small drippings would dry sitting up on the surface or if they'd be absorbed by the fabric.  I assumed a certain amount of absorption, of course, but I wanted a range of paint volume from place to place in the composition so I could observe the reality of it.

Here are some closeups of the wet paint still sitting up on the surface.

These were taken almost immediately after applying the paint (Side note: this phase was done using the funnscoop).  You can see here that I've got some great textures going on here, and the paint is nice and plump, sitting up on top of the fabric.




Here you get a better sense of the texture, but can also see some of the absorption I was watching for around the edges of the paint.







By this point, the absorption is actually pulling the textures apart and muddying up the paint considerably.  I've noticed properties in the red and yellow I use that should have suggested this possibility to me earlier (a side note to future me reading this: don't forget to write an entry about Larcoloid), but I hadn't thought about it.  Oops. (?)

Eventually, I decided to use another tool I've recently constructed (but had only used once before, and about which, future me, there is also not yet an entry- get on that) and added a second layer of paint.  You can see in the picture here how the initial red/yellow/black layer had seeped considerably into the fabric and gotten all muddy in most places while in others the original colours and texture were still perched proudly.  I tried to add the second layer keeping two things in mind:
a.) I wanted to keep all the best parts from the first layer visible, and
b.) I wanted to put the heaviest applications of the second layer on the places where the first layer had seeped the most, assuming the red/yellow/black would act as a primer and keep the blue/white from seeping too badly as well. 

This picture was taken yesterday, when I wore the shirt to my friend Rahkeen's house.  Which brings us to another piece, about which I'm actually really excited.

When I first moved to Cambridge back in maybe 2004 or so, one of the very first and closest friends I made was Rahkeen Gray.  He and I met at a fashion show put on by 280 Studios where we were both showing our paintings.  Then we realized we were passing each other on the sidewalk everyday on the way to each of our respective jobs, and then again in the evenings when we came home. We started hanging out a lot and were the best of friends for a few years.  We've grown apart over the past few years though, and I've been missing him a lot.  When I broke my skull, he and his girlfriend Madelyn came to visit me in the hospital and since then we've both been trying to make more of an effort to get together.


So the day before yesterday, I texted him and asked if he wanted to get together to make some art.  He was a little busy that day and asked if I could come over the next day (yesterday), and I agreed.  I had been thinking we'd just do some work side-by-side and it turned out he'd been thinking we'd collaborate.  We hadn't had a real conversation about anything, I just sort of showed up at his place with the bare-bones essentials of my studio:  2 canvases, 5 squirt bottles, 5 cans of paint, 3 silicone sculpting tools, 1 funnscoop, some rags, and my painting trough.  What ended up happening was that I got to do a sort of a private demonstration for Rahkeen.  He hadn't seen me actually working in so many years that the processes were all new to him. 


The piece is still is his studio drying, so I can't get a picture for a couple of days, but here's one I snapped before I left last night:

"Tiki Barber's also back" Jason Randolph Burrell 2011. Acrylic on Canvas.  20" x 16"

I wasn't sure what to call it so I decided to try out an idea I'd been discussing with Meghan the other night and just go to the headlines of the moment on my news feeds and create a title from those.  The idea was to extrapolate meaning in the art from the up-to-the-minute zeitgeist of the public consciousness.  All the headlines were about Charlie Sheen and Libya though, and neither subject I thought lent itself to the work, so I went to GoogleTrends to see what people were searching for.  The #1 search term: Tiki Barber.  Apparently he's a retired athlete coming out of retirement announced as of yesterday. I've chosen to take that as a sign that I've picked the right moment to come out my "retirement" as well.  This painting is, in my opinion, the best thing I've painted since I cracked my skull, and possibly since I met Meghan.  I feel like it heralds the dawn of the next phase for me.  In this piece I did some things with my silicone brushes I've never tried before, and overall was able to achieve a composition much more intricate than I've attempted recently.  I feel good.  I'm back.