Works in Progress, November 2011: Part Two

Today we're going to look at a few pieces I thought up until relatively recently were finished but which I'm now certain require a little more work. 

Remember this one?  I posted a video about it some time ago. You can watch it if you like, but be forewarned: it's long.  There's the silhouette of a figure standing at the end of this road.  It's currently called "Where Might This Dark Road End?"

The plan now is to replace the figure in this piece with another one from the newer, cartoony style I've been experimenting with recently.  I will also likely repaint the road itself and possibly replace the water with stones. It's unlikely I'll make a video of that, but I'll take plenty of pictures.

This one was originally not intended to be a work of art so much as a sign.  At 18" x 24", it's just slightly too large for the plastic tubs (which I call my paint troughs) in which I can safely pour and splatter large amounts of paint. 

However, there's a big ugly grey metal circuit breaker box on the wall of the apartment and this canvas is exactly the perfect size to hide it.  When I moved into this place, I put the then-blank canvas over the breaker box to cover it but wanted to- you know- paint something on it.

I have a bucket of wall paint I got from the landlord in case I need to touch up the walls, so I used that as the background for this painting.  I figured since the painting is especially meant for this particular wall, it was appropriate to make the transition as seamless as possible. In retrospect, for that reason, I should have used a 3/8" nap roller instead of a 3" sash brush, but I'm not too worried about it.

When I was a kid there were these boys that lived next door for a few years and we used to play together.  Sometimes we'd hang out in the unfinished attic over this weird old storage barn attached to their house.  The light fixture and bulb in this painting is as I remember the lights being in that space.  These crazy old-fashioned (hand-blown?) bulbs in ceramic fixtures attached to conduit pipes of some kind, jutting a few inches down from the rough-hewn wooden beams.  Obviously in this piece I chose to attach the bulb instead to a blue table.  The panel now serves as a sign marking the location of the circuit breakers- sort of a private absurdist joke.  I think I can make something more special out of it though.

In light of the recent changes I'm making in how I'm painting, I want very much to revisit this piece and really flesh it out.  There should be texture and light and the rest of whatever room that bulb is in.  I want it to be darker and dirtier and more like that weird old dusty attic space. 

Finally, this piece is the first painting I did of my friend Katie back in March.  In the following months I've almost just painted over this one a bunch of times.  There are some bits I love but for the most part, I'm just endlessly disappointed with it. 

Katie'll be leaving Massachusetts in a couple of months to go traveling and I want to complete a really good painting of her before she goes. 

Treating what's here as a blueprint of sorts, the completed painting will look very little like what you see now.  More context and more detail.  And brushstrokes.  It's funny- I've been violently opposed to brushstrokes for over a decade now and now they're becoming a necessary part of everything again.

Tomorrow, I'm going to write about a couple of works which have been in progress for quite some time. Both of these pieces were prophetic in their own ways, suggesting the changes that I would eventually make in the creative process, and each of them has a significant flaw which needs fixing.

Works in Progress, November 2011: Part One

This week, I'm going to show you what's sitting at the forefront of my pile of works in progress.  Literally.  And it's a huge fucking pile.

This first one today is a piece I wrote about back in July.  I was blackout drunk when I began it, not long after Meghan and I broke up.  Since finding it the following morning I've been wanting to continue the piece but it wasn't until maybe a couple of weeks ago that I did anything with it.  It's still not finished.  I'm not sure what the next steps will be but I know the success of this painting hinges on how well I take advantage of its impalement. 

Its origins may be murky, but it's come to represent (for me) time as measured by the sun, the inescapability of gravity, violent fucking and breaking through to a fresh way of thinking.  These are the underpinnings of its intentions; its growth marked by them. 
I took some video of the paint on the stick dripping onto the canvas to try to illustrate how some of the patterns actually form.  I'm not sure how much of the footage will prove valuable, but when this one's done I'll write an entry dedicated to it and showing the entire process.  As much of it, anyway, as I can remember. 

This next one is so far the front half of a pink and white pair of ladies' underpants pressed into a pool of blue and white paint.  More and more, I anticipate this piece will prove difficult to complete. 

I've had this painting hanging on the wall in various places around my studio for a couple of months now.  I keep moving it thinking maybe that will help me figure out what next to do with it, but frankly, I have no clue.  I simply have to trust that at the right moment, I'll know.  Hm.  I just read that paragraph back to myself.  It sounds like I'm painting about looking for love.  Go figure.  I guess I'll keep that in mind.

Now this one is one I'm really excited about.  Way back in April I wrote about this panel here. I was sort of afraid of fucking it up because of the religious training of my childhood. I go into a little more detail in the entry I just linked you to, but basically, I was raised to be Niantiquut, a religion my father, as near as I can piece together, pieced together himself especially for my brother and me.  One of the bits of Niantiquut taken from Native American lore is that the white birch is sacred and holy.

In the same way that my mother sometimes refers to herself as a Recovering Catholic, I sometimes refer to myself as a recovering Niantiquut.  So there you go.

It should be noted that this piece is a collaborative effort between me and Rahkeen Gray.  He was here when I was dripping the black on it and I asked him to contribute to it with one of my squeegee brushes.  He essentially determined the trajectory of the piece from that point onward with a single stroke.

Anyway, since the time I bought this panel and others like it, I've pretty much stopped painting on anything but birch panels.  They are in every way I care about entirely superior to canvas.  This particular piece is either a hair's width from completion or so far from being finished that I can even begin to see how it may end up.  I have very particular intentions for it but will keep them to myself for the moment out of superstitious reverence and because, well, I'm wrong a lot of the time.

Tomorrow, I'll post about some pieces I thought were finished but which I now know are not, and exactly what my intentions are for each of them. Altogether, I plan to share 15 works in progress over the course of the week.  Stay tuned!