Working in a Series

As a multi media artist, I enjoy exploring various art materials, combining media in unexpected ways, and working in many genres. I have a low threshhold for boredom and repetition and I like to move freely from one style of art to another, as a brief perusal of my website will testify. The challenge comes in keeping my body of work from resembling the machinations of a crazed gnat, jumping at random from one thing to the next.

To address this issue, I have worked in a series format for the past twenty years, choosing a large enough topic of interest that I can create many pieces that relate to each other as I explore the challenge I have set up. This pattern of art-making keeps one’s thinking fresh and one’s body of work consistent, yet diverse and interesting. Over the years, I have produced the Tapestry series, the Icon series, the Flow series, and the Noir series, among others.

My most recent series, under the working title 30×30, is a group of paintings on 30×30 gallery wrapped canvasses that explore mixed media and metal leaf combined with acrylic painting techniques. Each piece is executed in a limited though colorful palette with mixed media inclusions such as oil bar and oil-based pastel resists, hand made collage papers and raised textural passages, with an eye towards strong composition. Each piece in this series also features gold, copper and/or silver leaf, partially obscured and layered color and papers. Pictured on my website are several examples from the 30×30 series, including It is Written, Rapt in Red, Perique, Aurora, and Silver Lining. The latest piece I have done that loosely fits with the others, Sultana, is actually 30×40, the exception that proves the ever-evolving nature of my work, the stretching beyond what is working to be further challenged.

Before I worked on this series, I found it easier to work on paper, preferring 300 # d’Arches cold press and Strathmore Aquarius. I wanted to teach myself to work effectively on canvas and not to sacrifice any of the mixed media and visual techniques I had developed over the years as an art on paper artist. I also like the clean lines of a gallery wrapped canvas, and the immediacy of the imagery unencumbered by glass and framing. I am buying a new 30×30 canvas today, intent on continuing this series until I have gleaned all I can from it and exhausted the internal supply of images, color palettes, and provocative titles that are floating around in my head.