Rainy Day Ribbons and Tiles - New Paintings

I love rainy days like today to get some painting done! Despite the soggy fall gloom, I was particularly inspired; the patterns I was thinking about were kind of festive and loopy. These are just two of the pieces I started today. More to come soon.

Before and After - Book Page Paintings

Mitosis (left) and Early Man (right) - available in my shop.

This painting on the left is the one that started it all. It was an experiment. I liked the results, so later I came back to this idea. I ripped apart the rest of the book and painted on those pages too. And a whole new series was born. One of my most recent pieces is on the right. Using my initial motif of a cell wall with the nuclei splitting inside some of the contained areas, these small works have come full circle. Back to my scientific roots!

Science Into Art

I've been quite busy hibernating in my studio during this cold weather snap. These pieces were created with my old biological studies in mind. Painted on the pages ripped from an old chemistry book, they depict various compounds, muscle fibers, and a multi-planed formation. From left, "Crystalline Forms", "Peeky-Boo", and "Tetrahedron - Commercial Processes" - all of which are available now in my shop.

More Snow

There's more snow in Brooklyn today, and that means more paintings! I am working on some new pieces like these below on antique book pages. I found a series of great old science and history books from the 1960's several years ago and started painting on them as an experiment. Since I started working on this paper almost exclusively these days, I've been looking and able to find more books from the same publisher online.

The book pages have been discolored and stained over the years to a nice dark beige. This tint immediately gives the work character rather than just working with a scary, blank, bright-white, pristine piece of art paper. The pages soak up the gouache while at the same time allows the colors to remain bright. Here's a collection of them all together. (P.S. Thanks, Sushipot for the great photo tip!)

Recurring Themes

While painting my new series on old book pages, I have been making repeat patterns by slightly varying the shape and color of each piece. I have been looking at them and creating them as individual pieces, but as I was putting them in preservative covers, I started layout out similar works together. I didn't realize I had so many "themes"! Now, back to work...

The Origins of the Small Paintings on Book Pages

I never liked making small paintings. I've always been the sort of painter who needs to work large; like 5x7, or 6x9, as in feet. I always like to put my whole body into the creation of a work, and have it almost swallow me in its scale. I've just always felt more expressive working this way. Other New York artists I know (and family members) always laugh at me, saying that if I keep making incredibly large pieces, that one day, the paintings will take up all of what's left of my apartment, and I'll be forced to live in one small corner of it.

Well, the concept of working small never quite set in. It's something I do occasionally to make as gifts for people, or to try again to see if I've finally conquered this problem. The result is almost always, nope.

Last year, when I was cleaning out my studio, I came across a couple of small pieces that I've always loved. Despite their size (5x7- as in inches) I felt that they were pretty successful. They were made with gouache and with the imagery that has come to be my signature vocabulary in almost all of my recent work: biology and science. I never dated them, but I think they're from 2005. For the past two years, I've felt completely overwhelmed with health issues and my day job, that it seems that I just never had time or energy to make my large paintings anymore. I haven't felt the satisfaction of actually completing a significant piece of artwork in quite some time, and this was the whole reason I moved to New York in the first place. I pulled out the paintings (above) and used them as a model for the pieces that I've been doing recently.

These new works are much smaller, but I truly feel a sense of satisfaction in being able to complete several of them over the course of a week. They are a way for me to purge all of the designs and patterns that I see throughout the work week in the subway (and elswhere in the city) and translate them into works of art. I hope you enjoy looking at them as much as I enjoy making them.