In the past three days I have started preparing at least 5 canvases of varying sizes with a distinct spacial constraint in my work space. I'm juggling drying space with two easels on which I work with either painting or waiting for something to dry just enough before I continue working on it. Overall I am building backgrounds, though technically the works as they progress can be abstract explorations in themselves. could leave them as well enough, but the premise is unsatisfying and weighs as intellectually lazy on my part considering I have several concepts which I have been toying around with. The intersection between my starting such a big workload in such a short time given my sporadic art making schedule is I am starting many surfaces and I am not certain or completely oblivious to how I am going to finish each artwork. I generally have two series of works which I have been working on recently or researching to work on; Idle/Idol Worship, and basically making works generated from a pool of artists whose work I admire. Both of these ideas generate several lists in how I will explore each concept.
Idle/Idol Worship was a concept which emerged from the sort of celebrity worship which starts in the teenage years with an unchecked zeal and fervor, but wanes over time. As an adult I keep that impulse in check to some degree, but I still have several favorite actors/actresses, singers, performers and celebrity individuals. My students do as well. They plaster their notebooks with printouts and cut outs, draw pictures of them for class projects, have stickers, and basically make small sort of shrines to them in their belongings. In this idea, I have been looking at the celebrities which I have followed overtime, and taking that similar kind of "celebrity worship" and juxtapose it with different religious images and representations, such as candles, and I would wager a lot of Medieval and Renaissance Art. In a sense it is a look at what other people including myself worship besides religion, and how that worship manifests itself in visible ways.
In the second which is basically a stitching together of elements from various artists and art movements I like, it is a little more nebulous and difficult to pin down. Consistently on my list are artists Jose Parla and Kehinde Wiley. I love Parla's free-flowing abstractions of script and the way he takes elements from the street such as wheat pasted posters, advertisements left behind, and layers onto them washes of paint and scripting. From Wiley I admire his skill in rendering his figures in such a naturalistic fashion, imitating the works of historically lauded dead European/White men and mixes in the decorative elements with very garish flowery sometimes feminine aspects to them. Generally any sort of realism involving the human figure draws my attention, and lately a lot of that has been J.C. Leyendecker and Jack Vettrianno's works. Usually I will find some random photo on a fashion blogging site and apply elements from everything I have listed in this paragraph.
I am not sure which way I will veer in this bountiful problem... though it is not a problem at all. After all, more art is a good thing.
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