New Work - Perimeter - in progress

I'm in the process of finishing up a new piece - Perimeter.



Here are the individual photos.

Some of them are a bit blurry -- I was focusing on the painting, not the photography at the time, which you can probably tell ;)

Still, it's coming along nicely. Now I just need to put the finishing touches on the piece... and figure out how to frame it.











It's 36" wide by 28" high - large format mixed-media piece that is a larger version of a work I did a few years back. It is composed of acrylic, watercolor, marker, and oil pastels on paper. I anticipate it being completely finished by the beginning of July.

Online it doesn't show as much of the great texture as I'd like. Oh, well. It's the kind of thing you need to "be with" to appreciate. All in all, I'm fairly happy with it. Can think of things I'd do differently next time, but for now... happy, happy. A good weekend.

I'm painting again...

And drawing. And wishing I had a whole lot more time to do it. It's been a number of months since I worked on anything visual -- most of my time has been consumed by coding and information design and trying to collect my writing and clean my study and update my various blogs and whatnot. Oh, and do social things(?)

I guess I got a bit swamped by all the stuff I've got around... And it didn't help that I had neatly organized all my paints and brushes and supplies in various containers and put them in areas I was intending to use for artwork... but never got to it.

Organization is fine and necessary in some respects, but sometimes you just have to create.

I'm getting back to my geometries. And my cardboard pieces. And my oil pastels and watercolors. Still trying to sort out what moves me the most -- 'cause no matter how important something may be, no matter how significant it may be to others, no matter how socially acceptable and status-invoking a certain activity may be, if you don't have passion behind it... the kind of passion that would drive you to do it, even if you weren't getting paid... well, chances are you won't have the stick-to-it-iveness to hang in there through the tough times, the dry spells, the painfully niggling little details that all make up the sum total of your Work.

So, what moves me?

Color. Shape. Light. Nice precise lines, along with texture.

More to come.

I'm on artaculous

I just signed up with Artaculous, an international art networking startup that seems to be kind of a combination of Facebook and Yessy. I'm still working my way around it, trying to find out how it all works -- and how I can integrate it into my other social networking sites -- Blogger, Wordpress, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter... and more. All this social networking stuff gets to be a bit overwhelming at times, but that's probably due to my borderline-OCD obsession with detail.

I am a very detail-oriented person. Problem is, it can all get to be too much.

Anyway, here's what I posted over at Artaculous. It's a start...

About me

I am a mixed media artist and writer who has been creating abstract expressionist art for over 20 years. I have been working in solitude for most of that time, and I only started showing other people my work in the past 2 years. I'm a firm believer that art is created first in the cauldron of human experience, and only when it is completed there, should it find expression through the media we use. Whether we are using paint or pastels, clay or colored pencils, I believe the true measure of our work is not our facility with our chosen media, but our familiarity with our own souls.

That being said, I consider myself an artist first and a painter second. My life is my art, and I use whatever media seems apropos to express what I am experiencing at the moment. I work with acrylics, oil pastels, watercolor, gouache, colored pencil, marker, crayon, graphite... on paper, cardboard, canvas, canvasboard, and wood.

I have invested a great deal of my life in mindful meditation -- seeing what the true essence of a moment is. I have also studied the approach of artistic masters who devote countless hours not to painting or drawing their subjects, but to experiencing them, getting to know their essence, and reaching a place of innate, intimate understanding... before they ever start work.

Along the way, I have held a large number of jobs -- from working the graveyard shift at a styrofoam cup factory, to tutoring art history, to doing temporary legal secretarial work at some of Philadelphia's largest law firms, to supervising word processors, to building websites. I am currently engaged in the financial services industry, implementing emerging technologies at the enterprise level.

As far as my artwork goes, I am a firm believer in the ability of art to inspire and motivate... to transform the energies of human-inhabited spaces. I also believe that, in this day of exponentially increasing information, art embodies an essential way of communicating informational richness to the broadest audience possible. In "encoding" information through the use of color, shape, and light, an artist can both enlighten and unify the viewers in ways that connect the many seemingly disjointed aspects of our modern world. At no other time in history has art been so important -- particularly corporate art and art in public places. We all crave unity, we all crave connection. Art lets us do it in both highly sophisticated and lightning-fast ways. Art truly is the "written language" of our emerging world.

My art has been the one constant in my life, through the years, and given the enthusiastic responses I've received from folks who have seen my work, it's now time to make it available to the rest of the world. I've loved what I've created, and I've loved creating it. Now it's time for the babies to leap from the nest.

Meditations on vastness

Just under 4' x 8.5', Because Blue Always Forgives Red is the first large-format painting I finished last fall. I had a couple of other large canvases -- Blue Flame (4' x 5') and Rain At Dawn (4' x 9') -- in the works at the time, but this one I finished first.

I painted it for my sister, Carrie, who passed away in 1996 from cancer. It pretty much sums up how I knew and understood her to be -- carrying a great deal of weight and troubles, but still able to flow through it all with remarkable energy and grace.

Until last year, I had never seriously considered painting on canvas. It always seemed like such a big deal to me. And messy. And where would I work, anyway? But I got all fired up when my friend and fellow painter extraordinaire Stone Riley prodded and cajoled me into at least trying it.

So, I did.

I went out and bought some supplies, trucked them home, and we threw together some frames, stapled canvas onto them, and gesso'ed the heck out of them. Then we let them sit, and I started work on them a few weeks later. What came out of it all both surprised and frightened me a little. What I got was a wide swath of abstract colors, and two intensely dark works that just exude vastness.

I'm not sure where these two dark works "came from," but standing in front of them makes me want to fall to my knees in that abject sort of veneration I imagine the ancients felt in the face of Great Mystery. Whenever I show them to friends, they are moved -- sometimes to tears.

I, myself, am sometimes moved to tears. The depth is just so ... there. I simply procured the supplies, put myself in the mood, and then showed up with the intention to serve whatever Goodness chose to manifest itself through me. I'm sure it sounds all mystical and whatnot... and it was.

I really can't explain it. You'd have to see it for yourself.

To date, I have yet to stretch the canvases. I have them rolled and I haul them around to show friends and acquaintances, when I get the chance. I'm always interested to see how people take in the big, deep ones. Sometimes they're afraid. Very afraid. And they either freeze... or they back away and leave the room.

I still have to get pictures of Blue Flame and Rain At Dawn. It's pretty tough to photograph them without proper lighting. In any case, they are much better experienced in person.

And that's what you have to do with them -- not look at them, not intellectualize about them, but experience them.

And the vastness.

Improving my art space with feng shui

Mountain Air 3

10 inches wide x 7 inches high
Mixed media -- marker and oil pastel and watercolor and acrylic

Mountain Air 3 was created as part of an overall effort to "feng shui" my studio, which has a big chunk missing from the room -- ironically, the corner that's about self-awareness. I created a bunch of pieces that had strong blues and browns and blocky design in them and placed them in that corner, and the effect was palpable.

It actually seemed to help me be more comfortable in my space, become more focused in my work, and not feel this general sense of malaise that had dogged me, every time I went into the room, no matter how much "my space" I tried to make it. Let me tell you, it was a really weird feeling to have a studio of my own -- at last -- but not feel like it was friendly to me. When I feng-shui'ed it, that really changed. The improvement was dramatic, and my work really took off, as it hadn't in years.

I started out being something of a skeptic about feng shui, but after I made some simple but intentional changes to my space -- including adding a bunch of artwork that addressed the "energetic needs" of each quadrant of the room -- I became a real believer.

Why Piet?

One of the smaller pieces I created in 2007 -- or was it 2008? -- is a piece I've entitled Piet_1, in honor of Dutch Neo-Plasticist Painter, Piet Mondrian (1872-1944).



Looking at a set of Google search results on Piet Mondrian, it doesn't much look like one of his pieces. It's not full of straight lines and straightforward colors. It's actually very different from so many of the square-angled works of Mondrian... at least, at first glance.

But on closer inspection, it does have some elements in common:

• Common elements repeated -- the curved lines that intersect


• Similar colors to many of Mondrian's works -- yellow, blue, black, red -- without a whole lot of inter-mixing. Even in the places where the colors coincide, they do not mix -- they remain distinct, even in their overlapping.


• Blocks of single color -- the black squares and the blue areas

It's almost as though all those years I spent examining Mondrian had made an imprint in me, and then blended and swirled... gotten "swirled" by my own individual sensibilities.

In a very real way, it's as though the images of Mondrian I've absorbed over the years had turned into an optical palette of sorts... a pot of paint that, when undisturbed, has the Mondrian imprint on its surface... and my life, full of its own adventures and experiences, then reached down into the pot of paint with its own stick or brush or baster, and gave it a big swirl.

Piet_1 seems to be what happens when the undisturbed, imperturbable lines of Mondrian are given a good shake by an active, evolving life.

This is one of my smaller pieces, being 10 inches (254 mm) Wide x 7.75 inches (196.85 mm) High. It's mixed media -- oil pastel and water color and acrylic on watercolor paper. If you could see it in person, you'd catch the little sparkles that come up from the acrylic paint that's thinned with water -- one of my favorite aspects of acrylics. They turn into something different with each substance you mix into them... in this case, they have a faint sparkle to them, which makes a nice contrast with the matte watercolor paper.

This is also one of my favorite recent pieces -- I'm really happy with a lot of the work I've produced over the past couple of years (which I'm now carting out for all the world to see), and this piece has grown on me. When I first created it, I thought "What the hell was I thinking? How... uninspiring." But then I took a closer look at it, I thought about it and where it came from and what it told me about my evolving style, and lo and behold, it really grew on me.

It's for sale, but it's not framed. That's for the next owner to decide on. I'd probably go with a simple Bauhaus-like frame -- maybe something metallic to contrast with the colors. It's a subtle piece, and I think it would do well with a very simple frame. Whatever glass is used would be best chosen for its ability to allow light through to pick up the sheen from the acrylic colors.

It's a happy piece, and I will miss it when it goes. But I'm hoping someone else can gain some happiness from it, as well.

As always, if you like this work and would like to acquire a similar work of a different size or slightly different features, I am available for commissions. Contact me at kaystonerATyahooDOTcom for details.