Heads studies |

After working for some time exclusively as a printmaker I returned to painting excited to explore the medium in reaction to my work as a printer. In this sense I wanted to break away from the confinement inherent in printing. The medium has limitations demanded by squashing art through a press and in these paintings I wanted to shatter the blackness of my art, I wanted to break free of the flatness of images, and I wanted to work large. Because size, colour, and texture were the real subject of the paintings I needed a stable subject to explore these aesthetic ideas.

The heads were taken from photographs that were distorted in the darkroom. By bending the negatives of silhouetted heads the faces were minimized and I was able to explore the black space in the picture with colourful fields. Since the paintings were large and free of detail the distorted structure of the head was very important. In this project I was able to work on 7 foot canvases, with a knife, and large gestural brush strokes, achieving the goals I had set.

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The initial way into this body of work was a litho study of a head. Here distortion and deconstruction played a significant role in the drawing. I did this print at the very end of 2 years of intensive printing and it became the inspiration for the paintings and lithographs that followed. The introduction of colour into the prints was an important innovation. the drawing with its reticulated washes felt very painterly, but the addition of the flat mono-printed hues really became an emphasis of the work.

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I expanded the motif, moving from heads to hands in a set of etchings. In the small works I also took the work back to the simplicity of a linear drawing with particular emphasis on long continuous lines. The thought of returning to the motif of large 7′ paintings using color and texture beginning with these three etchings is compelling. Like much of the work the ideas are no completely worked out, further exploration and discovery seems just beyond the moment.