What is coming out of the creative studio? These last couple of years have been spuradic. I have moved around a lot. But, lets get to it... As it goes, returning from my break into abstraction, I came back in with a strong desire to make reality pictures, mostly landscapes. I had to work out some issues concerning aesthetics in painting. I needed to figure out how to bend my mind around resolving issues of landscape simply, without getting too complicated, flat, and boring...
For the most part, I was able to extract what I needed to see in order to resolve contemporary aesthetics from abstraction that make a picture "interesting"; but, for the most part, most of this work was failed crap. The friction between the two aesthetic poles in my mind is noticeable. Concerning realistic or narrative images, I struggled between the power dominance between the less interesting aesthetic of self-taught realism, and the far more interesting abstract languages considered in academics. While on an adventure in Big Bend, I was able to make resolutions to this conflict of dimension and aesthetic language, composition and subject matter in cattle paintings.
Great exercise pictures, cattle, landscapes, but time to get on to real narratives and say something. Below, is an oil painting titled "The Breaking of The Last Horse" painted in 2010. It is a reference to the spiritual/moral decay of the United States. The distant background depicts a "paramount" landscape like those of Big Bend, beneath, a small version of Washington D.C., burning. In the middle ground there is a sea of misguided souls with their leader waiting in anxious anxiety for the final foot to drop, the Pale Horseman to catch his horse and ride, bringing about the complete end of a nation. This was a painting foraged in despair, and as a warning of the prophetic times. It was also rendered in a time when I was doing open air landscape studies in Big Bend and, therefore, rendered in oil. It was signed in cursive with my full name in the lower left with the Latin "anno Domini", which is an annotation referring to when an age in the Christian Calendar has past. This was a signature technique observed by the old masters. This picture was rendered over the winter of 2009 and completed in early 2010. The below image is a poor digital representation with a hard light burn on the sky, as it were, this painting was sold to a man in Tampa, Florida, and shortly afterwards, all accurate documentations of this painting were lost by the artist...
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