WIRED was one of ‘Those’ paintings!
‘Those’ paintings are the ones that torment me, the ones that start out with ‘my’ intentions, but somehow find their way into ‘having’ to be painted for some other reason.
Like many of my larger paintings, ‘Wired’ started on a vast sheet of loose canvas on my studio floor, perhaps 12’ or so. I love wet on wet, so down on my hands and knees with various intense Golden High Flow Acrylics and Inks, Plaster Spatulas (my favorite tools as they allow me to move fast and furious), and anything else that allowed me to make marks. For days I rolled around on the ground with this canvas, enjoying the layers of rich color and texture as the painting came to life. What I envisioned was a beautiful field of wildflowers with a palette of bold Leroy Neiman color. Then, things went sideways!!
The paint gods stepped in one afternoon.
‘Wired’ (not titled at the time), was lying on the ground. I stood over it with a squeeze bottle of black paint (I use this often for major mark making) and started to draw large, what I intuitively felt needed to fill the canvas over my beautiful color and texture, with abstract TULIPS, with thick black stems. This DID NOT make sense and I was very upset! Yet I knew this would make sense sometime down the road so I had to step away for awhile.
A few weeks later I started to work on the painting again, filling the ‘tulips' with strange, bright, annoying color and shapes and these little pots got painted into the bottom of the painting - I love the color and textures, but they just didn’t seem like pots, yet there they were and who am I to fight with the painting gods! Again, I had to step away, as I was really upset, yet I knew, somehow, the painting would make sense - somehow, later. The meanings are always revealed on these paintings that are not of my own doing.
Over the course of the next month I finished the painting with detail and signed it, but was I was utterly confused as it still made no sense to me. Until one day when I was talking to my girlfriend about the title ‘tulips,’ telling her it just doesn’t fit. She said, “You know, they look like TV sets.” OMG! I said, “That’s it! These aren’t tulips. Those ARE TV’s and … they are Cell Phones and Laptops and Headphones and Video Games and …. They are All Things electronic that take away our attention from what is directly behind those TV’s - all that beautiful color - Nature.
And the pots made sense as they weren’t pots, they were buildings, condos, houses and the heavy black curly lines of what I thought were stems, are actually cords that tie us to that technology. It all made sense.
And you would think that it would make me sad. It was quite the opposite. I felt hopeful as showed me that there was a clear choice in consciousness, which the painting so clearly shows, that all you need to do to ‘smell the roses’ is as easy as diverting you eyes. Nature, beauty and life is only a few inches away from a screen.
“WIRED” is a perfect example of how some paintings are painted through me as opposed to by me - not always fun, but when it’s all done, the satisfaction is well worth the effort. Again, another one-of-a-kind painting that can never be duplicated.
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- Subject Matter: Abstract
- Created: 2017
- Collections: Abstractions, BIG!, BOLD & BRAVE!