preGtextanall

I have titled this Gallery Pre-Gaduate for lack of a better idea. It is basically the first ten years of my journey as a painter. It begins with Numero Uno. I have always called that painting so for obvious reasons; it was my first effort in painting. It was really a model study, but over the years it has come to represent, to me, who I am as an artist. The first time you mix paint on a palette and put it on canvas can be very frustrating. I remember just putting it of thick and pushing it around. Making spontaneous decisions in the background and having an overall feeling that it was the most natural thing to do. And it was frustrating.

As the paintings progressed I became entrenched in the battle of learning how to draw natural form. Concurrently, I became enamoured with the Dutch painters of the Baroque Period of Art History. In particular, Rembrandt van Rijn and Peter Paul Rubens. Although it would be a long time before I could say I really understood what they were doing, the techniques they employed were my focus.

Because I was so focused on technique, creating an underpainting to work out the drawing, form, and composition and then glazing thin layers of colors, I was not really paying attention to subject matter. For the most part, I did a lot of model studies and portraiture. After some time I grew tired of this. I needed to say something with my work. I was certainly opinionated in the rest of my life. During this period of my career people who saw my work after they had met me would say, without fail, that they expected my work to look different. Eventually I understood what the comment meant.

The last piece, in this gallery, chronologically, of this period is Betrayal. That was my first attempt at narrative painting. It is based on the collapse of my first marriage. A sort of who betrayed who. When I was painting the male figures face I struggled to not make it look like me. I made the figure bald (which becomes more ironic as the years go by). I began to add more and more white into the face as I redrew and redrew. It became ridiculously separate from the rest of the figure, so out of frustration, I carved out the face and walked away from it. When I got back to the painting I decided to cut my losses and leave it. It became a point of interest in the painting and I learned to trust my intuition.

Celtic Self Portrait is one out of a series of five paintings where I explored a mixture of the abstract qualities of Celtic knotwork and style, and natural form. Most of these paintings are on odd shaped canvases that were particular to the design of the painting.