Over the past year I have been working on several fronts updating my painting techniques, building my studio store, and working on a new website. Although I have been working since 1998 on the themes that dominate my work this website represents the start of a new chapter in my development as as artist.
What Does This website have offer?
One of the main ingredients to my growth has been sharing a deeper understanding about the oil painting medium itself. I have experimented with a lot of materials over the years and have found that understanding their unique properties is critical to the construction of well made paintings. For example, I have found that if I mix raw umber (ex. Williamsburg's Raw Umber) with other oil paint colors that my paintings dry faster. I also found that I can add more body to my oil paintings by adding mediums such as Winsor & Newton's Liquin Impasto or Oleopasto. To show you what I mean I have included a short Youtube video below demonstrating the mixing of raw umber and medium with a single color of paint.
Why Experiment?
Another ingredient to my growth has been a willingness to experiment with what I am trying to 'say' with my work. For many artists what they are trying to say comes from a place that has no words so the work is highly autobiographical and personal. And that is true for artists who are formally trained in art school as well as self-taught artists who are called Outsider artists.
As time goes by the words associated with an artists' work come from sources outside the artist themselves and include curators, gallerists, reporters, friends, family, etc. Sometimes the words used to describe an artists work are obtuse or mundane and sometimes they are irrelevant or insightful but the most important point is that people other than the artists themselves are engaged in the work enough to try to put into words what they are seeing. This is a critical component to the development of an artist and is a byproduct of the experimentation that every artist does.
For me, as I have developed and shown my work, I have had the pleasure and opportunity to run into many people willing to share their insight into my work. The resultant is that I have a greater understanding about what I do as an artist than what I did when I first started and that gives me the courage and willingness to keep pushing forward to find the next chapter in my story.
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