Month: February 2022

I pulled a few of my “For Fritz” paintings out to show some friends over the weekend and by chance these four wound up clustered together below my “Los Inmigrantes.” They played so nicely together I made a note of the four.

I have sixteen of these in total and of course some work better with others. We have six on a wall in our house. None of these are in that cluster. Interesting that hiding some makes others stronger and certain combinations make the individual pieces sing. They are interactive.

While working on the sixteen I wound up with an extra painting of three of the colors. I put one of the those in the Roco Members Show and it sold. The couple who bought it contacted me through this blog and asked if I had any more for sale. I told them I had hoped to show the 16 someday and I would rather not sell them. I mentioned the two other extras and they bought both of those. While they were here they asked if I could do a fourth before retiring the series. And now they have their own cluster out there.

Funny, thinking back on the route these pieces took. I started with sketches based on jpegs of figurative paintings snagged from my Tumblr feed. I quickly simplified the forms and decided to limit myself to three parts for each piece. I worked on the drawings on the wall, tweaking the curves for days.

I settled on the four drawings I liked best and developed them as one piece, painting and repainting the parts with acrylic paint, solid colors, some straight from the tube or jar. I determined I didn’t need the negative space on the four sheets of paper and found some 1/8 inch plastic. I photographed the drawings and scaled them up to fit the plastic sheets by projecting them on to the plastic. I took the sheets down to my neighbor, Jared’s, used his jig saw to cut them out. Pete Monacelli helped me mount wood frame to the back of the plastic so I could hang them. Duane helped me photograph the pieces so I could come up with this reproduction.

I heard that Rochester Contemporary was going back to allowing four entries in their upcoming 6×6 exhibition. They started with ten, reduced the limit to four and then held it at three for the last few years. I was having with this wood motif during those four years. I needed four to work the mathematical variations and then I did variations on those for six years. When they switched their limit to three I entered smashed beer cans in protest.

Virtually the same religiously toned pallet as my stations of the cross with a heftier cream, they are ready to submit. They aren’t really wall pieces, I like the way look sitting on a table or a shelf, so I don’t put any hanging apparatus on them. RoCo figures out a way to hang for the show and then someone takes them home.

I love this rough cut Adirondack pine. Our friends, Pete and Shelley built heir whole house out of it. They gave me some boards from a mill up there. They are all roughly an inch deep none of them are six inches in width so I settled on a pleasing proportion, the smaller band is 1 3/4 high and the bigger band is 4 and 1/4 wide for a total of 6, and I glued them together leaving the rough cut on the top and bottom.