Since moving everything home from my PAFA studio I have been going through a lot of old paintings from my student days there in cleaning and sorting and reconfiguring my home studio. Some of the paintings I have sold recently in a studio fire sale via my Facebook page ( one going to a fan in Italy) and others are being recycled for surfaces to be painted on again after a fresh coat of primer. I love painting on the surface of an old painting, its so rich and sometimes textural in unexpected ways.
There are so many paintings though that I can't keep them all and I have even just tossed some---you can't keep everything and you end up it seems as a painter keeping too much stuff anyway. Some of them are also just terrible, and failures--but its good in a way to see the paint mileage add up when looking at all of this old work, some of which I remember painting and being pretty frustrated with at the time. I can see though that being a prolific painter can also create serious storage issues in just a few short years as these paintings can start stacking up if they are not sold or going out to galleries.
There are other paintings though, a handful that I decided to revisit and rework as an experiment and see what might happen in going back into and over them, playing around stylistically using the old painting as a sketch a in a way to build off of. The compositions were good like the one above and it gave me a good ground to start on.
In playing around with paint and revisiting these sometime four year old paintings I took some big liberties style or approach wise based on what I had done the first time. I think having an old work to play with kind of gave me a freedom that I have in a sketchbook as I were, the risk is small, if I messed up-oh well, it was a "gonner anyway".
I also had some ideas or thoughts to try and work looser and push paint around having seen the Zorn show in NYC and Alex Kanevsky's last show got me hungry to push paint around in a more vigorous fashion. I have also been looking at the work of Daniel Pitten and Balcomb Green who both paint in a more abstract and textural fashion with a sometimes collage-like and dreamy feel to their work.
I also wanted to just get back to the easel and haven't had the chance yet to get out and plein air paint yet and these studio paintings can be worked on at any time after my commercial deadlines are over for the day.
I really played around with the paint handling, trying in a way to not make smoothly painted transitions, roll the brush, etc. In this case I liked painting on the one below ( Life 11-14) on panel the most and the one at the top ( Two Figures) the second. The bottom one (Grandma Scarf )was from a Sunday Life session at PAFA with Scott Noel and I started thinking of how the Russian Social realist so boldly applied their strokes of paint. Their work as a whole remains a big inspiration for me in the meaty way they approached painting.
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