My current sculpture and painting is installation-based of 3 components: recycled-packaging sculptures, oil ‘portraits’ of the sculptures, and free-hanging painted-paper ‘puppet clouds’. A fourth component of stuffed, recycled-fabric ‘shadow puppets’ is evolving.
The recycled cardboard pieces are generated from packaging collected mostly by friends. The luxury in making art from the detritus of our increasingly consumerist culture feels both appropriate and humorous: the formality of Tea and Tissue boxes holds a particular fascination for me. Packaging/Boxes at once reflect any particular culture in miniature, and further, where and how we live and work: often it seems that I am making models of some past or future architecture.
The Puppet Clouds are made of art paper and acrylic paint. I intend them as stand-ins for growth-trees-clouds. They interrupt the cityscape of the boxes and their portraits. I approach them as 3-D paintings: the initial color/texture painting of the paper, the cutting out, re-painting, and assembling evolve over a relatively longer period of time of 2-3 weeks, and are tweaked in a sort of endlessly indulgent way.
The Oil Portraits contextualize the architecture of the boxes; that is for me, they humanize them. Brush-marks that generate shade and light conspire toward a sense of some ‘one’ being there: the observer, the figure, is suggested without being represented. Having looked at the sculptures without the paintings, that is, having turned all the paintings to the wall one day, I found the sculptures lonely, cooler, and wanting their warm-body companions.
Together these works strive to inspire a sense of my own private and public environment. Landscape and light fractured and reproduced within canvas or cardboard windows and floating paper paint.