One of My Favorite Spots on van Gogh's Starry Night

One of My Favorite Spots on van Gogh's Starry Night

Here is one of my latest paintings in a somewhat low resolution image.  It is hanging in our Faculty exhibit that will be up in the Plunkett Gallery of Hardman Hall until sometime in mid-September.  I call it a P'Art Object, because it's a part of a work of art.  As the title lets you know, this is to be found on van Gogh's Starry Night.  It's a tiny spot blown up big (original about an inch across; painting five feet).  I won't say where it is in case you would like to try to spot it.  The photo works like a distant view; depending on your eyes several feet away or more you see what appears to be big gigantic gobs of impasto brushstrokes made by huge brushes with spots of bare canvas catching paint where the weave lifts the crossings of huge threads.  You walk up close and find it is pretty much flat and covered with thousands of brush strokes, layers of glaze peeking out from around and under them and enlivened with streaks of scumbling.  (Darned autocorrect doesn't believe scumbling is a real word.)  Of course the low resolution of the image causes the subtleties of surface texture, color, and details to disappear when you zoom in.  So here is a close-up.  We can call it "One of my favorite spots on one of my favorite spots on van Gogh's Starry Night".

So you can see how painterly the whole is.  It works in a similar way as the painting in an earlier post called Buddha of the Ten-Thousand Colors.  I like to play with people's perceptions.  And I like what paint can do. Just trompe l'oeil (fooling the eye) isn't enough.   It's more interesting when it is obviously paint and then turns into something else.  Or rather the other way around.  The viewers become very aware of the shift in their perceptions as they approach the painting.  When I did old-fashioned trompe l'oeil paintings they tended to get poked and kicked as people tested their suspicions that the object wasn't what they were seeing, and some got angry when they realized they'd been fooled.  When you get to looking at the real brush strokes in this you can see the real canvas weave made visible by the glazes pooling in the spaces between the threads.  The scumbling resembles the gaps in van Gogh's giant strokes.  What tickles my fancy about this painting most is that it is a painted representation of paint.

The Temptation of St. Anthony (still life painting)

This is another older painting (someday soon I'll have newer stuff), from the 1990's.  The francs were usable cash at the time.   It is in the tradition of old trompe l'oeil collections of scraps, like Peto's and Harnett's letter racks, or bulletin board paintings.  You put into them whatever you want, so they are sometimes called a quod libet. The theme of this one is of the foolishness of desires and takes its title (The Temptation of St. Anthony) from the paperback book in the lower left, Flaubert's Tentation de Saint'Antoine.  So in a way it is also a Vanitas.  But when I started it began with the wish that I could paint or have painted the Temptation of St. Anthony panel of the Issenheim Altarpiece.  There it was on the cover of the book, so I built a still life around it.  Some of the things on the table top are real things and some are painted illusions.  In person you can't tell which is real and which painted, but in a photo I think it starts to be more obvious.  The surface itself is an old drafting table top complete with cuts, scratches, and paint spots from decades of real use.  The table fell apart so I used the top as a painting panel.

Flaubert wrote the book because he was torn inside from two sets of values.  Part of him loved art and beautiful things and other such worldly pleasures.  Part of him had a rather Puritan urge to forgo all the foolishness of desires and live a life of what we would call voluntary simplicity.  These two characters fight also within me, and probably in a good number of us.  

The painting won best in show in a regional juried exhibit, and is now owned by the Macon Museum of Art and Science.  They had a conservator treat the match heads, lest a mouse scratch them and set the museum on fire.  They aren't a museum that exhibits their own collection permanently, but every once in a while it gets selected to join other works in a curated exhibit.  I can't resist saying that one time it was in with a show that included some quite famous names.  See what I mean about temptation?

No, you can't see any credit card numbers on it.

A Sierpinski Mandala

This was painted in 2006.  Like the Buddha of 10,000 colors that I posted a while ago, it consists of squares of color, this time in a variety of sizes.  The whole is 20" x 20".

A Sierpinski carpet is a two-dimensional surface that has no surface.  Theoretically, that is. You take a square and divide it into nine squares.  Then you remove the middle.  Take each of the eight squares left and divide them into nine.  Remove the middle.  Continue until infinity.

It was rather difficult to get to infinity.  Awfully small squares and infinite time.  

When I decided it was close enough, the similarity to cosmic diagrams of esoteric Buddhism struck me, and also the one and the eight repeating.  In Hindu-Buddhism the numbers one and eight are special.  The Buddha is one, and then there is the eight-fold path.  So I painted a faint image of a meditating Buddha in the center square.  In the real painting it is much harder to see.  The camera sees more than the eye in this case, and adjusting the color didn't help.  The eight-spoked wheels on the eight green squares are printed on and are also more hidden than in the photo.  

Every once in a while I get an irrational urge to paint something like this, even though this is not how I usually work.  Some day it may make sense.