Ladders

Ladders. I make them now. Here are two more ladders paintings, both acrylic on canvas...

And here is the first one in this new series which I completed last week ...

I've wondered recently if, in fact, I base my work on geometric shapes that are appealing to me. I went from circles (365.series) to rectangles (the row houses) to circles within rectangles (the Beyond Rorschach pieces in my last thesis) and now I seem to be back to rectangles / squares again with these ladders. I wonder, are triangles next? That's something to think about.

Something Old, Something New

I reworked an old painting, The State of Independence. I was not quite happy with it at the time I first conceived of it. It was one of those in-between floater pieces. One that doesn't fit in a series, one that I needed to make for whatever reason in order to get to somewhere else in my work. So this piece was one of those...just hanging out, not belonging. I am series motivated, I like to make things in groups so that I can explore multiple angles of an issue. If I have a true interest, it's not going away in one piece, I have to thoroughly exhaust myself with the the subject before I'm done.

An outside force did compel me to dig this piece out of its storage container...it's a long story, and it seems to be a moot point for me now because of my excitement of coming up with this. Seems this piece was almost finished and I just didn't know it. I don't want to say it was nagging me, because it didn't keep me up at night, but I didn't like the piece until now. Every time I saw it I disliked myself a tiny little bit for not getting it right and not know where to start to do so. The fact is (and I knew it at the time too), that my metaphor was not sound. And with the way I work, that's absolutely everything...like, if I don't have that working, I should forget about even putting the paint down.

Ah, but you see, this was for an 'assignment'. At the time, I resented having an art 'assignment' (other than a thesis) in grad school...oh who am I kidding, I still do resent it. Needless to say, this one was a fail for me, but I had not had parameters set on me since becoming a professional artist, or ever really. I guess the moral of the story is, I don't do well with art assignments because, who cares, get me to my next series!

So this piece was lying about and something compelled me to pick it up again and 'fix' it. Right now it's tentatively named Step. I like the idea of exploring the metaphors for ladders, so I'm going to go with that premise for exploring any new works, for now.


Here we are, new and improved...