The first week of the semester had me driving down to Long Island, New York to visit Semester 3 mentor April Gornik. Gornik was every bit as brilliant as I expected and we had a great visit. She gave me a lot of notes, but to do a short summary here we talked a lot about under painting, avoiding perfunctory areas of my canvas, and looking at light and speed in my work. She was extremely generous and took time to critique every work I showed her. She had amazing insight and picked out numerous things I had not seen myself.
The following works are from weeks 1 and 2. April and several professors in my program inspired me to work larger, slower, and push these further. These are all under painted in compliments and I'm working with a lot more layers and glazes.
These two are both from the perspective of being underwater. Some one told me at the residency that there wasn't anything to fear in contrails or a blue sky. They said that if they were trapped underwater than they would know to be afraid. The figure is new. I haven't painted a figure in several years. It seemed necessary to the narrative.
This fire painting is early in the process, but I like it so far. It's for a group show in Minnesota, and I don't think it will make it to the residency, but it's something I wanted to do. The fore ground is going to be very difficult to photograph it's all black or off black trees.
This last one plays more toward the beauty than the fear in the sublime. It's going to be a bamboo forrest, but this is the second layer of the under painting and I think the colors capture my signature mood.
