ShortScale.org

Here's what I painted over the past few months, after a 15 year hiatus. You can see a similarity among them, which is a form I seem to need to fuck around with right now. I started with the tiny globs and exploded into the long sinewy leech shapes. The one called Strand is easily the darkest among them. The palette is dark and grim, and there's something happening in the paint that makes it appear even more stark. But there are actually little stray bits of color that betray a hopefulness. All of these were done in the deepest of depression, but by the time I got to Kernel and Weep I was pulling out of it a little. Fibers is about as small as I would want to work. I think it's 8x10.

This group shows both the ones I haven't finished, and the process stages of some of the others. I have a sort of fetish about process because it allows us to see how something changed over time. Obviously, if I am not done with something, it may be unrecognizable by the time I finish. I have taken a break in order to move my operations out of the carpeted guest room and down to the guitar lab/painting studio, which has linoleum floors to catch acrylic paint spills. In order to do that, I had to finish up my last few guitar projects. The only thing left is to install a Duncan Antiquity four pole pup in the Mandocaster copy that Aug built.

Okay, I could have retaken the one with the guitar in it. I thought I could throw that in as bait. You can follow along with some of the progress, but a few make radical shifts midway. In some cases you lose great brush work in order to have a better final piece. The one called Kernel was so promising when I made the black outlines for it, but at a certain point I thought it was starting to get too representational and so I overhauled it. Follow your instincts but wear a rubber.

I made very little effort to cover over the framed area that was already painted. I got a few of these old framed works from yard sales and painted over factory prints (or whatever). Both of the two with the white frames has canvas strips glued onto wood. I was determined to paint the image on top, but ultimately caved in favor of the matting. They have the look of old barn relics in person. I can totally see the leap from my work on relic guitars back to this. For one thing I clipped through these and a few others (including massive rework) over the course of only a few months.

What you can't tell in these photos is that the blue Angel with the graffiti swirls is like 4x5 FEET! SHIT IS HUGE. What I will point out in that one only is that there are a few spots I got right on the very first day, and they never changed. By the sixth major iteration I had totally removed the angel's face, when I noticed the better one on the lower left. Then I did some minor emphasis on it to cement it to the rest of the picture. It could be called done, but I would like to tone down the dark, cartoony lines around the swirls. I have given away several of these already, but there are a few that I will keep for myself, even if I have to hang them down in my studio.

Really nice stuff, dude!

WANNA SEE MOREZ!

This one is my fav (though they're all good)

Very nice. Oddly organic looking.

Funny you should single out that one, Astro. That's the only humorous one, and in person looks VULGAR. The bottom part looks like a tongue, and the top, well...It's called Octopus, but that's just to distract from what's really going on.

i really like them
show us more when ready

they all kinda remind me of human organs

Damn DGNR8, your shit is quality. they draw me in, I feel like I could reach into some of your paintings, they are 3d.

robert(original) wrote:they all kinda remind me of human organs

yes, a very internal quality! i like how fluid they look. thumbs up!

I positively love this painting.

Yep That one, up there is my fav, too.
Really nice work

Thanks for all teh kind words. I like that one too, and it flew together. Some are just inspired.

I am probably not going to get back to painting for a while. I need to fix up a Gretsch and the Malikaster, but I have also been cartooning after a very long absence. At least now I know I can go back to painting. I am not afraid of being stuck without ideas. What I hope to do is start to incorporate higher forms of linear art, poetry, and prose into comics. It's what makes sense to me right now. I will post some when I can. Right now. it's lots of sketching.

What's interesting is that I was trying to get away from any kind of representation with the paintings. Comics have to be somewhat representational in order to communicate a story. Jesus--I can't imagine how I would make these paintings into stories, but that's a provocative thought. Are there any abstract comics out there? In any case, I have had to go back to the drawing board, which consists of drawing anatomical figures.

DGNR8 wrote:Jesus--I can't imagine how I would make these paintings into stories,

It would defeat the purpose. Unless, like I see some are, you intend a sort of triptych which is already sort of inferred in the one with Jesus on the left, since the triptych is an idea of Christian origin to begin with anyway... Which in a sense makes it seem like an instant cop-out whether or not those were your intentions.

I like this one on the left best, but I still think you should paint actual things rather than squiggles.

That should be painted on a guitar