New Work from February

I just finished a new painting a couple of days back. It took up most of my painting time in February and I'm not sold on the results. I wanted to do something that was connected in some way to some of the sculptures from the beach...try to marry the two concepts in some way. I will need to look at it a lot in the next couple of weeks to see if it's telling the truth. I wanted to continue the experiments with white and the stick pattern had some promising qualities so I went with it here. In real life it is 48 " long and 24" tall and when you look at it there is a nice rhythm created by the seemingly randomly overlapped sticks. If you give it a chance it is even somewhat mesmerizing, a quality that works for me. I get a similar feel when looking at the better Jackson Pollock paintings. Along with this rhythmic Brownian movement of the sticks, I tried to create some tension between the shallow depths implied by the darker "stones" in the lower left corner and upper right quarter that appear to be under the "sticks", and the darker circle of sticks and the patch of sticks in the lower right corner that are more ambiguously situated. In the end I think it does what I wanted it to do, I just wonder, if with that said, it is interesting enough to give a damn about visually.



In a regards to the marriage, here are some stick images from the beach that suggested this painting. In a totally unrelated matter, Josh, I enjoyed very much reading the bit you wrote about Aleksander and Poland that Norb appended to his last writing.