More Untitled

My goal is to actually use disposable palettes, but no, I just keep piling out paint on my glass palette, even as I am trying to scrape it clean.

These are four more oil paintings on canvas board that will find there way over to the smaller work blog soon. They're still wet. I am also trying to not work infinitely on one painting until there is no more room for a single brushstroke. You may also notice I have limited my palette to colors found in nature.

I was at a brunch meeting yesterday with a passel of artists (okay, maybe 20 artists.) We've been invited to participate in a curatorial project over in Italy. The first part of the exhibition was held this past summer. One of my smaller abstract paintings went over for that exhibition. It took place in the archaeological museum in Ameila, Italy. Roughly and in a nutshell, the premise of the exhibition is part cultural exchange, part contextual exchange. There are two more exhibitions within the framework of the project. Next year, a show here in L.A., and next summer, a response exhibition in Italy again.

Which is all to say that as I was talking to John, the curator of the exhibition, about my new empty pool paintings, he mentioned the landscape artists from 17th century Italy that depicted romanticized ruins. He later sent me several links for research. I have a minor in art history, so it registered in my image databank, but it's been awhile since I've looked in that direction.

Among the exponents of this »romantic« approach to the landscape were the artists of »Rovinismo«, in whose paintings images of grottoes and ruins played a significant role. These painters emphasised the gloomy, bizarre aspects of crumbling, overgrown architecture and grottoes, integrating them into richly suggestive scenes veiled in mystery. With their picturesque appeal, such images call to mind pagan mystery plays or the cult activities of forbidden secret sects. http://www.staatsgalerie.de/malereiundplastik_e/nl_intro.php

Sounds perfect!

It's lame to leave them Untitled. I know that.
Titles are important to me and I have not been able to access the time and space needed for that just yet. I'm merely staving off the inevitable.