LS No. 138 Painting

I’m a painter and designer from Dallas, Texas who now lives and works in Chicago, Illinois. My work uses a limited, minimal palette, that focuses on a rhythm of compositional studies that are built on the idea of palimpsest. The pieces go through a month’s long process where they are continually reworked, and where each new layer is being influence by the last. The driving idea behind all these works is that the process is primary, and product is secondary. The act, movement, reaction, and exploration is what’s seen in the expression of the works final iteration. I don't go into a painting with the expectation of creating some specific idea that I've worked out and tested and prepared for, but rather, I go into a painting with the expectation of what the process is going to be, how that process is going to work, and using that process to create what is trying to be revealed. When I started this project, I wanted to go back to some ideas that I had been working on early in my painting career. At that time, I was painting landscapes of rural farmlands in Western Kansas, where the land is calculated and geometric. Rather than going back and painting those observations again, I wanted to work on essentially what I see as compositional exercises based on those principals I had studied. When this series started, they were much more geometric and graphite heavy. But I didn’t start getting the results I was looking for until I started to reduce that scale of composition that I was working through. From there, things began to get more minimal and gave me more interest in the results I was getting. The technical ideas came from a series of portraits that I had worked on in 2014 and 15 where I was trying to be rougher and more expressive with my strokes. A big idea that came out of this was that the removal of paint was just as important as adding it. I needed those two things to work in balance and be an important aspect of this series. The minimal palette came from a plein air painting class where I discovered that the more I limited myself color wise, the better the results I was getting. So going into this project I knew I was going to strictly work in grey scale with the blue tones coming from the use of graphite that were mixed in. These pieces are about finding a balance between disorder and arrangement, and the light and space, void and form, and figure-figure, that is created within the composition.