by the Moonlight, Part 1: Making Good Work Takes Time
Salt and Moon 2022
Making good work takes time. Visual memories, ideas, and sense of direction for the work all need to cook in the brain for a while before hitting the canvas. Recently, I released part of a new collection of work. I’ve called this series “by the Moonlight” and it is based on reflections, ideas and processes that have roots in other work.
As a creative person, sometimes you just don’t feel like you are done with an idea…it isn’t finished yet, it needs more exploration, more study, more development. In 2021, I painted “Monument” a painting that was the last large, finished piece of the work released in Fall of that year. It had a finished painting underneath which was beautiful but not quite where I was headed so I washed layers of color over it in various intensities giving it a layered, monochromatic, minimal appearance with lots of shades and detail underneath. Then I added light at the end in a more geometric fashion. At that point, I felt satisfied. I called it Monument for three reasons. First, to me, it alluded to our societal monuments. It had a sense that there is something being presented which is then washed over with other commentary to simplify it, making it more digestible to the masses…more manageable…more deserving of commemoration and reverence. Second, it was a way to uplift and give reverence to the processes and painting style progress I had made in the previous year which was now contributing to better work. Third; it was visually reminiscent of geographical formations in the Southwest, the product of a summer road trip (2021) through South Texas, New Mexico, and Colorado. I view these formations as monuments to the earth, its age, and its layered beauty.
by the Moonlight, early release photographed in the studio in early October 2022
For the “By the Moonlight” paintings I went back even further to 2020, to my first studio downtown where I settled in the same week of my 50th birthday, the same week COVID began to affect our lives in a truly serious way. It was there in that place downtown that I was finally able to get into my creative process and truly understand it…getting in that place where it just flows from the body like an extension of self is not always easy. It was there that I started work on “I am not a landscape, I am a Moondance” and began to really hone my personal style of painting.
I am not a landscape…I am a Moondance
“Moondance” is a large painting and it recently sold. Prior to that, it was hanging in my dining room for several months. I don’t have much on the walls in my home but this painting was special. It had a real sense of all the things I wanted for my work and because it was such an accurate expression of me, it was a beautiful addition to my home. Since painting it, thoughts of the process, meaning, and final visual presentation of it have remained vivid in my mind.
This summer, I felt somehow, as I often do, that I was getting off track and wanted to explore more of what I had been doing previously so I went back to what inspired “Monument” to find my start. The “by the Moonlight” paintings are an effort to go back to “Moondance” to explore its components and bring them together in new ways. This new series, both in process and visuality explores the rustic, primitive aspects of nature while being connected to the humanness of wanting to experience order in something unknown, beautiful, carefree, and even scary. Its colors are layered with shadows, revealing only a few, hopeful and beautiful bright spots. The series reaches just the right balance of dark and light, minimal and textural. It is both where I am from and where I am headed.
This new series is all things I’m crazy about. Salt air, the sound of waves crashing in the distance, hints of moonlight creating colorful clouds. Delightful, mysterious, peaceful, powerful nature. Deserving of respect. The majority of the paintings are high contrast with all of the brightness and darkness of the world wrapped together in complicated beauty. It is detailed and textured up close yet somewhat minimal from afar. I Cannot wait to see where this goes.