writing about the paintings

Four Parts

There is a quietude to my paintings. They have a horizontal and vertical-based, calm composition. There is a politeness in the framing and cutting off of objects. I’ve aimed to build a suite of paintings which the viewer can feel comfortable staying in for a longer amount of time. There are subtle details, shifts of hue and styles of painting, and nuggets of repeated objects from one painting to the next, but with the calm, stable composition, I leave the viewer room to contemplate and breathe.

In the paintings there are several cues for a constructed reality. The framing of the character and scene paintings become a cue for a constructed reality. The stuffed, stitched, transparent lion does the same using a variability of the painting language. The space is often ambiguous. In the diptych, the viewer cannot be certain as to whether the scene is inside or outdoors. In Chairs, the chairs almost seem to float in a sea of green grass. The window of For Walter is vague, opaque, and could thus be seen as a faux window in a stage set.

The frame around each of the paintings varies from Milky White to light Yellow Ochre, resembling wear from the pages of an old book. In the framing exists a single page number or a range of pages on the top right corner and the correlating short story title on the top left. This allows for the paintings to become more narrative works of art and to be seen as stories. Here, the images replace and become the text in a book.  

1. Character Paintings

The characters in the stories are pensive, thoughtful, composed, and in a sort of quiet space, and the paintings should reflect that. As the storyteller of For Wintonbury, I make paintings that give me space to breathe. Life is complicated, chaotic, and disorderly, and I desire a break from that. The color palettes reflect the characters in both age and in mood.  I chose one scene from each character’s story which has the most potential to best represent them. The viewer learns about the character through the objects in the scenes.

1. Scene Paintings

Significant scenes in the short stories appear in the smaller paintings of For Wintonbury. The paintings are in a consistent 16”x16” square format with a 2” painted frame including the correlating scene page number and short story title. The places and objects in the scene paintings do not best represent the characters as the larger character paintings do, but, rather, exist in order to display the character’s history and to provide more insight and visual narrative.

When they both needed a break, they sat in the two metal chairs positioned slightly diagonal from each other. Harvey always took the blue one, Theo, the red. Theo talked to Harvey about his day, describing his classmates' immature behavior, anything interesting he had learned from his professors, or stories from the headlines of the news. Harvey delighted in listening to

Chairs came to be after several times of driving by two rusty, and yet brightly colored, metal chairs that were positioned diagonally across from each other in a yard on a country back road. They brought questions for me. Who sits in these chairs? What do they talk about? Then I thought about Harvey and Theo, the brothers and how Harvey may listen to Theo talk about his day and his few years of life experience beyond that of the younger brother, how Harvey might be fiddling with Theo’s handmade, orange dominoes while he listens.