Archives: Holes
These are from 2006. One night, while walking the 5 feet from my desk to bed, I wondered what it would look like if I used safety-pins to pull open holes in the surface of my paintings. I thought the idea was hilarious, to have the focus of a piece be a void, so I ran with it.
Click for access to a larger view. Detail after the jump.
Each piece is 12″ x 12″ square, which would technically make them 17″ x 17″ hung as diamonds (see, Toni, the value of the pythagorean theorem!), so all told this would be about 55″ x 36″, acrylic on canvas with safety-pins.
Each piece has 3 layers of painting to give them more weight and substance.
Detail shot of the “Black Hole”:
March 31, 2009 at 1:50 pm
I remember when you did these, J.D. They were always a favorite of mine. Giving precedence to what isn’t there is a powerful way of rethinking composition. Reminds me of course of Lee Bontecou, but also of a piece by Alberto Giacometti that I always found so enthralling. It is called, “Hands Holding the Void”. Great job on these, even three years later they still have resonance.
April 2, 2009 at 8:02 am
I love the HOLE idea!! Amazing what you can think up when you’re not thinking!!
Imagine what you would’ve created if you had stubbed your toe along the way!
April 2, 2009 at 2:39 pm
Thanks, Vicki! When stubbing my toe or, more likely, stepping on a stray staple, I express myself through a very creative stream of unprintable swear words and arcane curses. Some day I may collect these into a podcast that I’m pitching to NPR, but given the number of bleeps they’d have to use, the basic idea would be similar to that in the Holes piece…
May 19, 2009 at 12:15 pm
[...] original impetus was to use the same method I used in Holes to create something like a ripple of water. Clearly, the rings here aren’t perfectly [...]
June 16, 2009 at 11:45 am
[...] This piece is actually the canvas I laid on the ground to paint the component parts of Holes. As I was doing that, I used masking tape and stencils to get the patterns you see in this. I [...]
March 9, 2010 at 1:14 pm
[...] advancement I’ve ever made in my method. The basic concept came to me when I was making “Holes” as something of a joke. What if I took 2 of those and interlocked them like a [...]