Between Drawing and Painting

Vivienne, 2009
Oil on Board, 30 x 30"


Sam in Chris's Kitchen, 2010
9 x 12", Oil on canvas

Even in the most "representational" pictures I feel like I am dealing with strategies of abstraction. The arrangement of a coat or a slipper is a device for moving the viewer's eye around the canvas.

Line making within painting: from the overlay of blocks, to the use of gestural strokes...It is a kind of negotiation on the ground. The eye plays around that negotiation. But the eye is bound within the image.

Review of artist Sam Branton

http://www.sambranton.com/Sam1/Review.htm

scroll down, my review is at the bottom...

sort of a mini essay...!

After the Raft of the Medusa - Varieties of Kitsch?

This is the last in the series. The raft became obscured by the skull but then I brought it back in shapes. This painting is satisfying in its composition but I am somewhat mistrustful of it. It is too obvious with the skull. But really it isn't about skulls at all as much as perhaps why they got so popular in fashion over the last few years but then it is also about my own adolescent art practice when I painted lots of skulls (and this is a skull from another painting of a skull I did when I was 16 or so...) so maybe it is about the dredging of adolescent emotions or how they refuse being laid to rest. Or the prolongation of adolescence into adulthood which I seem to witness everywhere. This is indescribably cheesy. Paradoxically, I quite like it for this reason. But this is why I can't really trust it.



Album cover for a great band lost at sea.