Gray Spaces
2013-2016
Monochrome Gray and Brown Painting
Light as value, in space, is a simpler tool than light as an abundance of color. It’s the kind of restraint that builds control with the materials and I had a preference for that kind of rigidity late in college.
There is an ethic and ideal to being neutral, or attempting to be so. It could be something de-contextual in nature, possibly dehumanizing, or like an anti-intellectual anaysis.
I had no name for the paintings individually so I called all of them gray paintings. As an abstraction, monochrome or nearly monochrome painting was supposed to focus on “taking people out of it.” The emphasis was not on whether figures or human and/or narrative imagery would appear in the painting but rather on how people identify with the artwork. Painting the psychological space of an architectural world seemed like my calling at the time. Gray was a rule that allowed for conceptual control within that abstraction.
︎ (1) was made a year after undergraduate while living in Boston
︎ (2) and (3) are small paintings on paper made in Rome, Italy during my last year of undergraduate. It was the first time I felt I could use oil paint consistently for effect
3︎ (4) "...What always is antithetical is my method, or the anticipation that, as it were, impels me to paint.”
I mixed my black from red, green, and blue. My brown from red, green, and brown. My gray was very blue. The logic was clear that this green and red could mix well into all the other dull colors wet-on-wet until you couldn’t see them, an insurance policy for when the monochrome pallete was disturbed.
That was the sensibility I had at the time. However I threw away the plans and kept flat, solid color. Maybe antithetical. It’s like a halfway measure: provisional, somewhat abandoned.
4
(1)
Gray I
oil on canvas
54 x 70
2016
(2)
Untitled 1 and 2 (Rome)
oil on paper
approx. 5 x 7
2013
(3)
Study 1 (Rome)
oil on paper
8 x 12
2013
(4)
"...What always is antithetical is my method, or the anticipation that, as it were, impels me to paint.”
^
oil on canvas
8 x 11 feet
2014
exhibtions:
Painting Senior Exhibition, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence RI 2014 (4)
Group Show at Circolo Degli Artisti, Rome Italy 2013 (2 & 3)