"Resting Place for the Unknown"

Semi Abstract Egg

This is another painting still left over from my old studio, when I was downtown. It was stretched on what I called permanent stretchers on the wall. I can see now what it was an attempt of, when back then I really had no idea.

I've always found it interesting how you can go back and look over time how an artist style progresses. Even the most commercial of artists, really any discipline that could be considered an art, if you go back and look at their results you can see how it changes over time.

You should be able to see the metamorphosis of their results. With any passion it eventually becomes the result of work, combined with results, and then more work combined with more results, and then wash and repeat.

With art its very much a labor of love, nobody pays me to do all this, in fact the payoff is seldom seen, which think about it…the only payoff for sure, in this passion, is the actual painting. It’s not a paycheck, a promotion, recognition, or anything else tied to most efforts. The payoff is the actual piece of art, and again there in lies value, unique value.

This is a typical subject matter from that period; a body of water, mountains, flat landscape in the foreground, and an obelisk-like object in the center. Were this one begins to differ are the random lines in the foreground and the green egg looking object to the left. Again, the ruin-esk like structures seem to appear, the flat (lonely) quasi paving stone in the foreground, and the mixture of flat sky and painterly ground. I like the title, it fits well.

This painting is hard to describe; I was painting so many paintings back then, at least one a week. I remember trying to make this piece different but without having an intent. Which is not as easy as it may seem. Think about it for a minute... You're trying to create something without any intent, and you want to make it different than anything else you've created without any intent.

Don’t get me wrong, once the painting starts to form there are intents and there becomes the attempt to make it what I see. Once again, it's the concept that the painting was conceived with no intent and becomes purely consequential.