Dark Days
Literally. Apparently today marks the beginning of Monsoon Season in San Francisco.
I own both a rain coat and an umbrella, but when I walk, the excess water from both these implements stream directly down the front of my pants, soaking them in a manner shaped like a pair of leather chaps that stays damp for the rest of the day. Am I the problem here or were these rain implements just poorly designed? I’m from Los Angeles originally so dressing for the rain is to me a lot like foreigners trying to put on those water recycling suits in Dune. And I’m no Paul Atreides.
Whatever. Here’s some eerily apt art for today:
“Dark Days” 23″ x 23″ acrylic on Canvas, with safety pins.
This continues my recent forays into mounting smaller framed paintings onto a common understructure (here, here, here and here).
For this piece I saved all the darker pieces I had accumulated and thought I might use them in a way that references some of Ad Reinhardt’s work. I don’t know if that comes through, but a starting point is only that and the intent was never to slavishly recreate his work.
When I constructed this over the weekend, I did choose the diagonal slanting composition of the different colors in part to reference rain, but had no idea this would cause a hurricane on the day I posted it. Maybe I should travel to Africa next. Or Los Angeles.
Anyways, detail shot after the jump.
DETAIL!
One of the considerations that has most informed how I make art is that there is more to see than one will pick up in a single viewing. The hope being that a year after you set it up in your room you can idly look at it closely and find new details you never saw before. So while there may be a fairly simple overall color presentation in the overall piece, when you start getting into the individual scraps, there are actually a lot more colors, tones, textures, etc. than are immediately apparent.
That’s the hope anyways.
Last time I posted one of these a commenter asked about the process. I took some photos and will try to make a photo essay later if I have time.
-JD
