Paintings

I started painting not long after I started sculpture. At this point I do more painting than sculpture. This may have more to do with the fact that we have more wall space than shelf space than anything else.

This is from a dream of my wife's. it's the first "flat" thing I've done, though the keys are 3D and so is the face (it was the first attempt to do the face for "Death Has No Dominion" in the Gargoyles page).

Doing some branching out lately. I always liked Magritte's Chateau des Pyrrenes, and a few years ago I bought this stone from a booth at Quartzite, a huge rock and gem show held every year in the desert. I didn't know what it looked like then, but a few moments' thought and a lot of filing, and I found out. I've painted the cloud and sea background a couple of times now, the first one awful, the next one okay. The stone really pops out nicely.

This next one is an experiment in paint. I painted this scene as a copy of Vangogh's "Starry Night," then laid down a thick coating of Golden Self-Levellling Clear Gel, then more paint, then more gel, about 8 or 9 times. The effect doesn't photograph at all well, but if you were standing in front of it and moving from side to side you'd see individual paint blots move about.

Then for some reason I really fell in love with fish.

I guess next was this death thing...

And then, noses! Oh, how perfect is nature's quietly magnificent creation, the nose. As sublime as it is modest, the nose has taken very little attention of artists. I hope with this small piece to rectify this inequity. The phrase at the bottom right of the piece reads:

It's not

The nose

It's the face

The one on the upper right is my brother in law, Karl Derfler. I entered this in the art show at the Del Mar Fair in 2002, and we had fun hanging out near where it hung, watching kids tweak the noses and say things like, "That's YOUR nose." "No way!"

But of course I could not have forgotten the Ear, that just as sublime and yet almost as humble organ hardly thought of in this day and age! The title of this piece is "Auris Reaudis" (The Ear, Reheard). Yeah, so I've got this Sartor Resartus thing going on. I spent some time in Scotland and Thomas Carlyle's book came across my desk one day. It's an introduction to a ten-volume work on the philosophy of clothes, written by Diogenes Teufelsdrockh, Professor of Things in General at Weissnichtwo University. Good book. Thanks.

That skull on the third from the right is really meant to be a skull; that's a sort of three dimensional ear reflexology diagram. It makes sense in context. Really. So does Spock. The other ears are Osama bin Laden and Oprah. George Bush and my own ear are also part of this series (and as accurate as can be from news pictures) but not pictured.

On this site I'm going to start describing how I make things, since that's what I'd love to see others do on their art-related web sites.

 

These are a diptych called Abundance and Scarcity. The little hands are polymer clay, made with molds. The semicircular ridges are made with Golden Acrylic molding gel. I find these gels to be wonderfully versatile.

Polymer clay is a great medium too. It comes in many colors and bakes hard in your oven. I find that a mixture of "Super Sculpey" (the flesh colored, if you're of European descent, stuff that comes in a big box; it's preferred by doll makers) with the brand called Premo. Usually that gives it a slightly pink color, but it combines the good workability of the pink stuff (it doesn't pull when you sculpt with it; you'll know what that means if you try it) with the strength and flexibility of the Premo.

This is an apple. Just an apple. With symbols on it. As I remember, I painted this while reading The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown. He had me going for a while about the secret codes in Da Vinci's work and the unacknowledged secrets of the Catholic Church. Too bad most of it was just made up.

The symbols aren't made up---they're from alchemical texts. Each one signifies an element, mixture or process, in no particular order beyond that of looking good in juxtaposition.

   

Here's a still life drawing with one of those pods that comes off of a tree---I don't know what kind. I've always thought of them as alien pods.

 

Another painting with those symbols.

 

Experimenting with shading and value.

This painting is my biggest, at 2 feet by 3 feet, and for the sake of measurement, I have included my actual feet in the picture. That's so funny that I don't have the heart to cut them out. This is of course a copy of Salvador Dali's La Motre Molle, which I painted from a poster. I'm sure you can find references to it on the web for comparison. All the masters learned to paint by copying previous masters, and I've barely started at painting, so I don't have the trouble with copying that other artists ("Don't you want to paint something original?") who've shared their viewpoints on this picture.

I've always liked the energy of this painting, and I've had the poster in my garage (so I see it twice a day, at least). It took me a while to figure out what colors to use. I vaguely recall that Dali was a proponent of using just a few colors in a work, relying on blending to come up with the rest of the spectrum. He also advocated using a balance of color that relied on a color wheel to get a triad (or rectangle) of colors that balance each other appropriately. I've found that using colors that just perfectly balance really makes the colors pop like in this one. Here I used Raw Sienna for the table and mixed Burnt Sienna with Phthalo Blue (green shade) for the shadow under the watch. Yellow Ochre is the yellow bit over the table (in the background). The same Phthalo Blue GS was used for the numbers and the creatures emerging from the white face of the watch. That's not the two colors that Dali seemed to have painted his original in, but it's possible the Siennas and Yellow Ochre are all kinda sorta the same shade, maybe, is what I told myself when I realized in the middle of the work that the colors I was using just didn't have the reach I wanted. Oh yeah, and I used Iridescent Gold for the highlights of the metal parts of the watch. All in all, it turned out well, the colors looking brilliant. I use Golden Acrylics, by the way, for everything except large backgrounds where cheaper paints are more economical.

This is my laptop. It's a Dell Inspiron, a good machine except that it's pretty heavy and every time I reboot one or two keys don't register. It sometimes takes two or three reboots to get a workable keyboard. Um, but it was cheap. And, um, this sort of started happening after I did the paint job. I peeled off the Dell logo (which was where the eye is in the middle) and then put tape over all the sensitive bits, then sprayed with black primer. Then a few coats of Iridescent Blue mixed with Phthalo Blue GS did me for the background. I mixed Iridescent Green with water and some Acrylic Flow Release (more than they recommend) + Glazing Liquid. The mica flakes are suspended so loosely that they flow all over and get into all the nooks and crannies (such as the brush strokes of previous coats). After that I painted the center eye and poured two-part epoxy resin into the channel where the eye is. It makes for quite an eye. Later, after I had a really great time at one of the Six Degrees Records cd parties and scored a bunch of free cds, I added a flame coming out the top of the eye. A Sufi emblem maybe.

   
This has no title, no obvious meaning, beyond ink dropping into water. Yet when I look at it there's something to it that gets me.

Here's a copy of an old painting by Frederic Edwin Church called Cotopaxi. I loved this painting when I saw it in the art museum in Balboa Park. I was struck by the motion and force of the earth penetrating the sky and the sky (or at least the blue of the water) penetrating the earth. A yin-yang symbol done by someone who may never have seen one.

                        

It took me six months to do, with all the glazing, layers, etc., and I learned a ton. During that time, my sister-in-law Monica died of breast cancer. I put her ashes into the volcano's ash cloud.

As before, if it's a concept that you could write out in a paragraph to explain it, then you should just write out the paragraph, because it's hard to paint.

            

This is one of my weirder pieces. The border is hammered copper and it is stamped, THEY BUG ME THEY BUG ME etc. At the very end it says ... TILL I WRITE THEM DOWN. Those are flies. I captured some to be models for this one. That's a Dali watch in the middle, and a Vitruvian fly on the right. They are made from polymer clay covered with copper foil and painted a transparent green. To the natural eye the color combination looks nifty. The nails are normal nails that I've covered with copper foil, since I couldn't find any copper nails. If you can't buy it, make it.

Rob Chansky