BHCC classes

Please check out the Joe Fig show at MassArt. This amazing artist creates scale models that are exact reproductions of well- known contemporary artist studios, based on interviews and photos done with the artists. Make the time to see this! It's well worth the trip:
http://www.massart.edu/Galleries/Featured_Exhibitions/Joe_Fig.html

shown: model of Inka Essenhigh's studio
Inside the Painter's Studio offers a unique glimpse into contemporary artistic practice. After interviewing each artist and documenting their studios, Joe Fig beautifully renders their workspaces in miniature. His astonishingly detailed sculptures, which are exhibited alongside paintings, drawings, and prints by the artists, transport the viewer into the mind and space of the creative individual. The works by Fig and both emerging and established painters, coupled with frank interviews, detail the intricacies of studio life.
Featuring: Gregory Amenoff, Ross Bleckner, Chuck Close, Will Cotton, Inka Essenhigh, Eric Fischl, Barnaby Furnas, April Gornik, Jane Hammond, Ryan McGinness, Julie Mehretu, Malcolm Morley, Steve Mumford, Philip Pearlstein, Matthew Ritchie, Alexis Rockman, Dana Schutz, James Siena,Joan Snyder, Billy Sullivan

more panels

Here you can see the detail developing- I go from general to specific, big to small...in working on tyvek, the pieces become like giant drawings or watercolors and they proceed very fast, like the paintings are ahead of me and I'm racing to keep up. 

The tentative working title for this is "A Private World On The Sea Of Ice"- it's a direct reference to the CD Friedrich painting "Sea Of Ice" as well as being about my time in Maine. When I'm there, the peninsula where my family lives becomes a very private world where nothing else really matters. It's one of those places you go to that, while you're there, you lose yourself.

My work deals mainly with the figure and the landscape and that New England tradition/realtionship. In referencing the Friedrich piece, I want the viewer to question the new relationship to nature: no longer is it primarily adversarial and about survival- it's recreational (danger at a distance) Where the Friedrich painting is about the destructive beauty and power of the wild and our smallness in it, in my private world I still can walk through that wildness without life and death danger. 

How do we experience nature when it no longer threatens us?

2nd panel

 Rolling out the tyvek with a blue base color that is common throughout the image. This color will come through the entire painting and establish the tone.

The first figure (Dave)

 Using the brush to create the form and gesture: I'm just roughly blocking in with a middle tone...

Blocking in more values, colors...

Next to the first panel, each one is approx. 5x9'.

design mockup/ in-progress for Babson show

These are the photos I'm working with...and the tentative design- I need these panels to both work/interact with the architectural space, and create a sort-of filmic memory narrative. These images were all shot in Maine on a frozen mud flat where the tide comes in and out, the water freezes and creates this carpet of ice that's always in flux.

inspiration

Caspar David Friedrich's The Sea of Ice (also called The Wreck of Hope). German romanticism at it's finest...

Babson under way

the space at Babson with Dana Clancy's work

Babson show in progress- just a start (1st panel). The show will have multiple vertical panels installed (on tyvek)

bird die off in boston?

found on A street, south boston, jan.4, 2011