Title: " July 17, 2008 "Acrylic on Canvas
49 x 47 inches
(This one is still on the studio wall, just finished today. The flash from the camera in the upper center shows the glossy sruface.)
Saturday, June 07, 2008
Friday, March 07, 2008
" March 5, 2008 "
Acrylic and Fiberglass on Canvas
54 x 48 inches
Third of the paintings using fiberglass sheet collaged onto the canvas. These change character as the lighting changes direction, intensity and quality. I imagine placing this first group of three paintings in a location where natural light can influence them through the day. This one, March 5, has yet to be put on its stretcher bars. It was photographed still stapled to the studio wall.
Monday, February 04, 2008
This morning I was walking around the small lake near my home, before driving to the studio. I had grabbed the nearest shirt off the chair without paying much attention to it, but halfway through my walk I became aware of what an intense color of blue the shirt is. The sky was cloudy, which can always enhance color, and the lake was reflecting the same silvery grey of the clouds. Then a strange shift in thought happened.
I have been working for nearly a year on paintings which are either black and white or, recently, mostly white. People have asked me why I'm doing white paintings, so I've struggled to give them an answer. The answer never really quite seemed to fit though. Maybe only now are the paintings starting to reveal their real purpose. By looking at these white on white, textured surfaces, I am becoming more aware of colors, shapes, and surface textures in my surroundings, not just in the studio.
I now think this series of work is less about what you see WITHIN the painting than about what you see BECAUSE OF the painting. That answer seems more "true" for now. A new one, another acrylic and fiberglass on canvas, will be finished in a couple days, so we'll see then if that thought still fits. I'll post a photo and will enjoy your comments.
Sunday, January 06, 2008
Wednesday, January 02, 2008
Part 2: The Process of Painting
During most of the year 2007, I painted with only black and white acrylic on translucent cotton vellum tracing paper. I titled the body of work “The Translucent Series”. The majority of the pieces are small, either 6 x 4 inches or 5 x 5 inches. The most recent paintings were done with only white acrylic or white gesso.
These paintings are moving closer to my idea of the “shell of the cicada”. I think of each finished painting as the physical evidence of a creative process that begins before the painting starts and continues after it is done. In this process, the viewer becomes an active participant in the creativity by bringing his or her own life experience and interpretations to the painting. Rather than producing art that works like flashy billboards or popular advertising, the tendency of much contemporary art today, I prefer a subtler conversational approach.
In working with the Translucent Series I allow the mediums to function naturally, let the paper warp, let the paint pool and bubble and crack as it dries, and I try to remain open to what the painting might have to say in this “conversation”. This method produces paintings that also seem very open to what the viewers bring to them. It is work that does not exclude the viewers by trying to tell them something, but instead includes the viewers in a conversation full of questions.
Today I will begin work on a new series of paintings. Those results will show up on this blogsite soon.
Michael Cross
During most of the year 2007, I painted with only black and white acrylic on translucent cotton vellum tracing paper. I titled the body of work “The Translucent Series”. The majority of the pieces are small, either 6 x 4 inches or 5 x 5 inches. The most recent paintings were done with only white acrylic or white gesso.
These paintings are moving closer to my idea of the “shell of the cicada”. I think of each finished painting as the physical evidence of a creative process that begins before the painting starts and continues after it is done. In this process, the viewer becomes an active participant in the creativity by bringing his or her own life experience and interpretations to the painting. Rather than producing art that works like flashy billboards or popular advertising, the tendency of much contemporary art today, I prefer a subtler conversational approach.
In working with the Translucent Series I allow the mediums to function naturally, let the paper warp, let the paint pool and bubble and crack as it dries, and I try to remain open to what the painting might have to say in this “conversation”. This method produces paintings that also seem very open to what the viewers bring to them. It is work that does not exclude the viewers by trying to tell them something, but instead includes the viewers in a conversation full of questions.
Today I will begin work on a new series of paintings. Those results will show up on this blogsite soon.
Michael Cross
Sunday, December 30, 2007
The Process of Painting
by Michael Cross
by Michael Cross
This attempts to put into words the ideas behind my art making process. By writing this, I do not intend to say this is how all artists should or do work. It is an approach that I personally have arrived at over many years, and can be seen as a snapshot of how I work at this particular time. That will change. Change is a necessary part of the process.
As background, when I began to learn to draw and paint as a child, my goal was to reproduce the things around me. Being outdoors in my rural environment was important to me, so the landscape in particular was what I wanted to paint. Barns, fields, fences, rock formations all appeared on my canvas boards and in charcoal drawings. Learning the skills of rendering these as accurately as possible fascinated me.
By the time I was in my teens, my feelings began to connect with the paintings, and I found that particular kinds of features in a landscape could represent my specific feelings and emotions: dark clouds could seem ominous, bright sunlit wheat fields were cheerful, windswept trees and foliage could have a wildness about them. I began to let my work be influenced by emotions, while still using realistic depictions. Some of the paintings now included human faces and figures that could indicate emotions more directly than landscape could. The process of visually inspired depiction began transforming into a process of emotionally inspired depiction.
Through, and for a few years after, college my paintings continued to move between landscape and figure, but gradually with less emphasis on realistic rendering of forms. By the time I began painting full time several years later, I was almost completely working with expressionist landscape painting, mostly influenced by the New Mexico desert where I attended college, and the Kansas prairie where I had grown up.
A big change in my work came when the look and feel of the paint medium I used became more important to me than the objective forms and figures in the paintings. Forms themselves were interesting apart from what they represented, and my goal moved from describing something on canvas to letting natural effects take place more freely on the surface. I did not want my paintings to depict things as much as I wanted them to themselves become things in the physical world. I was losing interest in making paintings look like something other than paintings.
(end of Part One..... to be continued in next posting, along with photos to illustrate some of these points.)
Wednesday, December 12, 2007
Saturday, December 08, 2007
Installation view of the four "Translucent Series" pieces in the current exhibit "Breaking News" which opened at Michael Cross Gallery in Dallas on December 2, and continues through December 30, 2007. These paintings are done in acrylic on vellum (translucent cotton paper). Each is suspended 3 inches from the wall from a 1/2-inch diameter plexiglas rod.(Two of the individual pieces are shown in the posts below.)
Friday, October 05, 2007
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
