26 posts tagged “painting”
I may be done. Hard to say. Just because there are some areas that I'm unsure of doesn't mean that I should work them more.
The background has taken most of my attention so far. Today moved from the foreground into the bale. I started with too small of a brush and lost my sense of mass, then backed up with a larger brush and started pushing around with the shadow areas- getting just far enough to leave a nice mess.
I didn't work on this yesterday, or the day before really- as my sister flew in from Sacramento to pick up my Dad's truck. It is the lovely Ford F-250 V-10 that effortlessly hauled the old Mustang down from Montana. Now it is off to it's new life as a California truck- it snowed yesterday and the day before; the last snow the truck will ever see. A bit too much truck for hauling groceries though- it will resume it's life as a working truck on my sister's little sheep ranch.
I decided to work larger for this series, 32 x 48, and work in acrylic house paint (yellow, green, brown, white). This series explores a meadow full of unwinding hay bails, from many summers ago up on the MT ranch. They occurred because of a mechanical defect with the bailer. They are meditations on physical collapse, once again investigating my father's life and struggle with cancer.
The "Proscenium" series of oil paintings relate to five thousand miles of interstate highway travel across the American West over the course of ten months to care for my father on his own inevitable journey with cancer. The primary signifier centers upon recognizing the demarcations of the heavily industrialized world that slip into every view, and not allowing the "suspension of disbelief" that removes these important signifiers in favor of a romanticized West. This parallels the mindset necessary in caring for my father, who was iconic to those who knew him as a stoic and self-reliant Western cattleman and rancher- and his loss from himself as the cancer, radiation, and chemotherapy physically wore him down. There are ten completed Proscenium works to date.
You may not be thinking "Gunslinger", but he was a Deputy Sheriff in Yellowstone County and still has his 6-shot revolver and leather holster- much closer to "Gunslinger" than modern law enforcement.
