I’ve already sold several pieces, and am in negotiation to sell a few more, in my ‘Blank Canvas’ Art Sale – though I still have another 30+ pieces I’d like to find new homes for, ASAP. In addition to those you can see at wretchedcreature.com, I wanted to post about a few others that aren’t listed there. Why aren’t they listed? Different reasons, which I’ll try to detail below:
This piece, titled ‘screwed’, is approximately 32×47″, and is acrylic (spray paint) and screws on/in plywood. I worked on this piece over the course of multiple years, carefully mapping out and then drilling thousands of tiny, careful holes in the wood, selecting lies GWB had publicly told the American people (and which I felt we all knew, by then, were blatant lies) and spray-painting them on in as twisted version of the American flag as GWB must stand by, then screwing, by hand, about 1600 tiny screws into the thing (without scratching the paint job, of course). Why is there no image of it on wretchedcreature.com? Well, I’m disappointed in it. The flag didn’t come out as well as I’d hoped, GWB’s face isn’t as clear as I’d hoped, and I didn’t finish it until 2006. I’d meant to have it done prior to GWB’s re-election, and when that failed (and my life changed), I set it aside for a long time. If you’re interested though, please, make me an offer.
This piece was one of the oldest I still have, circa 1998. The technique, the quality, even the theme and tone of the piece contribute to why it isn’t currently listed at wretchedcreature.com. It doesn’t fit in with the other work I have there. I think what I was trying to do was paint a black rainbow in the sun’s rays. As though, no matter how bright the things of this world may seem, none shines as bright, none is as pure, as the light and sacrifice of Jesus. I just don’t feel it was adequately communicated. My records indicate that this piece is titled ‘gothic inversion’ and that it is 18×24″, acrylic on canvas. If you’re interested, you can make an offer, but right now it’s hiding in the closet. It was taken down in the last round of “I don’t really want to see my old work, anymore”, years ago.
The piece at the right, incongruously titled ‘Spiraling Shape 4’ despite being the first painting I worked on after moving away from home in 1997 and the first of the “Spiraling Shape” series, is not listed at wretchedcreature.com primarily because I didn’t feel it conveyed anything emotional. When I was first putting the site together, it was important to me to stick to the stated theme, ’emotional artwork from a troubled mind’, which fit better with, well, most everything else I paint. This piece is 20×16″, acrylic and yarn on canvas, and if you want it, take it – every time I walk by this one, I half-wonder why I didn’t hide it in the closet with ‘gothic inversion’. On the other hand, as you can see in a semi-recent post I made about it, it does help me see how far I’ve come.
There’s this thing. It’s called ‘reign’, it’s 16×20″ and acrylic on canvas, and it was also painted in 1998. You can probably see what I was going for, though the bad photograph really brings out all its weaknesses. (In normal lighting, it’s somewhat less painful to look at. The brush strokes are less obvious, for a start.) There’s a fair amount of math at play in this piece. The color scheme is even based loosely on a derivation of the digits of pi. I remember when I liked it. I think I’d like it better if I did it now, with another 13 years’ experience at play. If you think you’d like it, make me an offer.
I have several more from the same period, all these rainbows. ‘Rainbow Connection 2’, ‘Rainbow Connection 3’, and ‘Spiraling Shape 6’:
The first one, ‘Rainbow Connection 2’ is actually glow-in-the-dark; an alternating pattern of rainbow stripes curved in the opposite direction from the visible stripes actually glows, either in black light or after being in a brightly lit room. This never worked as well as I would have liked, though it did work. It was a complex and fascinating attempt to achieve something I’m not sure I’d dare, now. Some of the things about it I could achieve with more skill, others would probably take a fair amount of experimentation and frustration with the materials before I was satisfied. As it was, I just made the one attempt, and left it at that. It was my practice run, and effectively discouraged further experimentation.
The second one, ‘Rainbow Connection 3’, which I thought of (before painting it) as an object passing through a rainbow and bending it along the way or leaving a wake, inspired a lot of lewd comparisons over the years. The frustrations I had with this one also informed a lot of my work in the time since, and I feel I have significantly improved my ability to mix and blend colors smoothly since painting ‘Rainbow Connection 3’. The third one, also numbered after-the-fact, is ‘Spiraling Shape 6’ and is probably the third or fourth thing I tried to paint after moving out on my own. It is roughly based on the golden mean, both in color and in shape, though I feel my later work interpreting the same thing came to a better result. All three are 16×20″, acrylic on canvas, except ‘Spiraling Shape 6’ which also has yarn. These three I had to dig around a bit for, to be sure I actually still had them. I keep them out of sight.
I also keep ‘Untitled Triptych 2’ out of sight. This was done while I was experimenting with reverse painting, and with painting onto glass, then carefully transferring just the paint from the glass to a painted canvas, and integrating the reverse-painted image with the canvas-painted image. I’d show you what this eventually led to, one of my greatest works (a portrait of Tyler Durden), but it was the first painting I ever sold, which was then gifted to someone, which was then stolen/lost by their evil ex-. I didn’t start seriously photographing my art until a year or two after that sale, and didn’t try to track it down for a photo before it was lost. Anyway, this thing is a 16×20″, acrylic on canvas image created as an experiment about translucency in the work that led to that project. (Alright, alright, there might be a painting or two that utilized the technique later, which I do have photos of. Tyler was better.)
The above image is ‘Untitled Triptyh’, three 16×20″ canvases, painted with acrylic, showing some of my earliest work with color blending, and using pure color to tell a story. The color reproduction in this image (as in all the images in this post) is not particularly good. I took the photo with the best camera I had in 2003 or 2004. I had a better camera for a time, but currently my best camera is in my iPhone. sigh. Anyway, I’ve had a lot of interest in this over the years, but only ever for one or two thirds of it; most people don’t seem to like the leftmost canvas. bleh.
And the last of my older artwork, I have one more small piece I created while I was working toward the one I started the post with. This piece is titled ‘screw Moo’, it’s approximately 17×14″, and is acrylic (spray paint) and screws on/in screws and wood. I adapted my painting ‘Moo’ to test out my ideas for creating a design from screws in a piece of plywood. This one was only hundreds of drilled holes and hundreds of screws, although it has the added bonus of the step of spray-painting half the screws before screwing them in, then trying not to scratch the paint on the screws while screwing them into a piece of wood. It was much more successful than the bigger piece, I think. The lighting in this photo is terrible; the background is just solid, spray-painted black. As with all the others, if you think this piece would look great in your home, make me an offer. I’d love to have it find its way to a new home.
Now on to the unseen of the newer work. The image at left, shot with my iPhone, is the best I have of this piece, which is … uhh… well, it’s sculptural, really. It’s about 8x11x6″, acrylic and yarn on canvas, and it’s titled ‘too far, not far enough’. I was learning to crochet, making little crocheted sculptures, and I began thinking about how to combine the sculptural work I was doing in yarn with the two-dimensional work I was doing on canvas. So I crocheted this right into the canvas (after painting the 2D part in colors I chose to match the yarn, ahead of time) and the blobby bits actually extend right off the image into the room. I really like this one. Unlike most of the stuff in this post, which I was tired of looking at a long time ago, this one I still like, and the reason it isn’t on wretchedcreature.com is that I have no idea how to present it there. A straight-on photo (like every other piece on the site) doesn’t show you what it is. What I’d like to do is take a bunch of photos and make an interactive image a viewer could mouse around and see it from multiple angles. Part of the reason I never followed through and made more pieces like this was the difficulty (near-impossiblitiy) of displaying them properly on my website.
Here’s another one I’ve never yet figured out a sufficient way to photograph. This is a 40×30″ monster of a painting, acrylic and ink on canvas, and it’s somewhat darker than it appears in the image at right. Dark enough that the words all down the left-hand edge, in sharpie, are almost unnoticeable. They disappear into the darkness. This piece is titled ‘this is how I…’, and the word repeated over and over down the side is “feel”. The darkness, the colors, the contrast, the shiny reflection of light which sharpie ink does and the paint does not, it’s all important to the piece, and I haven’t encountered a camera and lighting setup, since painting it, which captures the image accurately. And it was too big to take with me to the Art Walks, without causing trouble. So it’s almost never been seen. If you’re in the Phoenix area and would like to come by and see it some time, you’re welcome to. If you want to just buy it without getting a good look at it, that’s welcome, too. It’s a very emotional piece. Here was another attempt to get a good shot of it:
Not sure either shot does it any justice. I feel almost as bad about photos of the following painting, though I’m also pretty sure there were failures in the painting process as well:
You might not be able to tell by looking at that image, but it says “sleep” … in a way. The ‘s’ of sleep is just the shape of a wave in the darker block of the image, and it’s only there in glossy medium on a matte background – visible to the naked eye, but difficult to photograph. the l is the border between light and dark, and like the remaining letters, is further differentiated by a line of glitter/iridescent medium. The remaining waves, capped with looping lowercase e’s, are also painted on in a layer of glossy medium on a matte paint background, and the p marks the end of the glossy area. There were a lot of mixed-media ideas wrapped up in this 24×48″ piece titled ‘water, bed’, even though really it’s just acrylic on canvas. This piece is, right now, the most likely candidate among all the pieces I’ve shown you in this post to be painted over first. A lot of the details came out great; I especially appreciate the edge of the canvas, which is painted a darker blue where the face is lighter, and a lighter blue where the face is darker. Others were not as I’d hoped. Not being able to show it is, perhaps, the worst. If you have any interest in this piece at all, let me know soon – I already have an idea for painting over it. (I also have a couple other blank canvases in this size, but … ugh. I stare at this thing every day, knowing no one else has seen it. Knowing it’ll probably never find another home. I’m sure that’s why my mind goes right to painting over it.)
So, in addition to the pieces you can find at wretchedcreature.com, these are a few others I’ve still got around and wouldn’t mind being parted with. No reasonable offer refused, and on those old 16×20″ pieces, $20 seems pretty reasonable, right now.
