100 Poppies- Centennial of World War 1 Painting

In honor of the centennial of the start of World War 1, I am building a new painting, entitled "100 Poppies". I am using a simple pictorial sequence of 100 poppies images, representing the span of time in years that separates us, in the present, from the time of World War 1. Poppies are laid out in a linear time line format that starts in 1914 and leads to the present day. The chart starts in the lower left and moves to the right for twenty spaces, or years. It then starts again on the left side one row up. Thus it moves upwards for five rows. Each row can be conceived of as one generation.
 The painting is in two parts for ease of handling. The finished painting will be sixteen feet long and four feet high. I am building it for my solo show opening next month at Brooklyn Box.  It will take up an entire length of one wall of the gallery.  Again it is constructed using paper shopping bags, battlefield earth, and pigments.

 

The left hand section. Depicting the cauterized war years.

The unfinished right hand section of the painting.

Close up of encrusted poppie.

Cauterized charcoal poppie.

Mud encrusted Poppies wet with walnut stain. This home made walnut stain was created from nuts that were collected from the Harper's Ferry battle field during my visit last summer.

Mud spattered poppie.

Battlefield earth ,pigments and glue

Bag of poppies ready for application and finish painting.

Flying Squirrel poppies

New work on the easel

I'm posting some paintings that I am preparing for my one person show in June. It will be at Brooklyn Box gallery 543 Union Street, Brooklyn. More on that later.
With this work I am exploring ideas of time, nature, and human conflict. The time frame for the work is the one hundred year anniversary of the start of World War 1.  This work was partly inspired from reading Max Hastings book "Catastrophe 1914 Europe goes to war". In it I found some passing references to plants that solders found themselves fighting amongst at the begining of the war. The simple farm fields of Europe, that those farmers would never get to harvest. I have been thinking about how nature reclaims battlefields after visiting many sites of the American Civil War. Today most century old battlefields resemble pristine park lands. Set aside for our remembrance of those who fought there. In these places it seems that time has returned to a natural rhythm, a rhythm of the seasons, the "growing season". This beutiful natural world is the one that confronts us today as we try to imagine what it must have been like 100 years before.I thought about how to depict the yearly life cycle of common plants that might have significance with the gigantic battles of WW1 and the passage of 100 years.

I came up with simply painting out lines of the various plant forms one on top of the other, one hundred times. Laying one drawing on top of another. Mimicking the yearly growing cycle, year by year, decade by decade. Until I reached the one century mark.

Sugar beat painted one hundred times

Poppies painted one hundred times on grey

Poppies painted one hundred times on dark grey

Map of Europe with balanced stacks of chairs. I am planning to rework this painting a lot. I don't think that I need the map element any more. I am going to link the stacks of chairs together with string.