"The Big Show"

These are for an upcoming show at the Silas Marder Gallery, "The Big Show". Everything about this gallery and this invite felt good. These are of the "Love Hovel" series, are 8" x 10", and are really difficult to photograph. This sidelong candid shot with flash actually gives a better representation than any lighting or direct scanning I've tried. I think they should be videotaped, because they change so much as you approach and move around them.

The "Love Hovels" theme is used as a conceptual framework more than as a subjective narrative. It's a supplied context, which both frames and generates image-creation. I like thinking of subject matter this way, as a means which may or may not figure into the final piece, because it allows me such freedom. I can follow peculiar hunches regarding form or content. I can work with muddled logic of pictorial arrangement, or of illusionistic space.

The "Love Hovel" theme suggests so many possibilities. It's a place, an arrangement.....construction and debris.....an enclave...an "us"......a "them".....it's clannish. This all indicates directions for painting. It creates opportunities. I can focus on this as subject matter, but I can also let this be a backdrop for, say, an extensive exploration of cadmium red.

It's a context for generating new form using the process of painting. And all this happens within a rather traditional framework: a gravity-bound ground in a picture plane.