Dog Woods

This series evolved out of my work with expired house paint. I had made a number of panels using expired house paint. See a previous post about that process. I had always thought of some of them as a painted background, meaning I would paint something else on top of the image that I was achieving with the house paint. I felt that even though some of them were turning out quite beautiful on their own, that I perhaps needed another pictorial element.

As spring rolled around, the dog woods started to bloom. They are such a large and simple and numerous flower. Their delicate white color stands in contrast to the fresh green of the tree's leaves. I thought that these flowers might make a good pattern to add against the vertical background of my expired paint experiments.

My process was to pick some of the flowering dogwood blossoms and photograph them. After adjusting the contrast in photoshop and sizing them. I printed them with the laser printer.The paint is applied using the cut out paper as a stencil. After the painted shape of the blossom dried I added the delicate lines of the laser print photograph on as a top layer.

 

 

 

Figurative Landscapes

 

 

This series came about because a student assistant had mixed up too much of this flesh toned color. They kept adding more and more paint together in an effort to get a different color. In the end the student abandoned the attempt and left a half gallon of this color setting on the mixing table unused. Me, being the studio manager, not wanting to discard the large amount of paint, set it aside hoping another project might come along where that paint might be useful.

Thinking that the color reminded me of flesh, I wondered if I could use it that way. First I tried to use it as a flesh tone and experimented with painting a figure. However the paint did not mix well with other paints. And I just wasn't finding anything with that approach that ultimately interested me. Working with some photographs I had taken that had been enlarged. I became interested in the abstract forms that the human body and skin can make. While not necessarily identifying any particular area of the body. The resulting images became abstracted landscapes of sorts in my mind. The flesh tone of the paint reinforces the essence and further references the human form.

I used laser print transfer to add a photographic line element. I also set the flesh tone against a dark background. Letting the two colors blend and merge with the print. The effect reminds me of an early wet plate photographic process.

All the paintings are 8.5 x11 inches. On a wood panel. 2024.