17—21_ peopleI moved to Manhattan.
Post-rut, I had spent a few years away from painting.
I wandered the Met a lot, looking at all the faces of people who, like my friends, once ate, slept and lived up and down lives.
I found my way back by doing portraits of friends and family.
This was less about portraiture and more figuring out my color world and how to physically deal with paint .
Giacometti’s grumbling about the impossibility of making a head has always needled me and eventually took me away from naturalistic skin tones, turning to color as a path to something more abstract, a distraction from the subject.
Continued post art school skepticism regarding the romance of art marks, combined with a desire to push the eye’s focus around the image and slow the quick scan, led me to mix techniques from sketched-in to washes to smooth realism in perhaps unexpected areas away from the face.
All of this pushed me further into a core belief that, in my work at least, ‘brushstrokes are just another idea’: additional conceptual tools rather than demonstrations of deeper feeling or artistic purity.
Hockney, Neel, Freud, Dumas, Disfarmer, Abbott, Sander, but also Oehlen, Silman and Rae.
I was interested in catching my sitters’ gists as I felt them, a connection that felt especially important during the pandemic, but much more interested in the ways the various shapes and stylistic areas of the paintings clashed and interacted.
In the middle of a portrait, I suddenly felt I had enough of doing people, left it unfinished, and moved on (apologies to that friend).
