This is a little series that I did as a part of a collaboration between the Tyler painters and the Boyer School of Music composers. My partner was Annie Neikirk and you can visit her website here: http://aneikirk.art.officelive.com/default.aspx
She wrote a piece in response to my PV2 series of drawings and then these are the paintings that I made in response to that work. All together we titled the collaboration Elegy. They're all a foot x foot on panel.
This is another series also about the military (big surprise I know!). I painted these paintings from some photos that a friend of mine that was stationed in Iraq in 2005 emailed me. These paintings were a nice "full circle" moment for me because I received these photos back in 2007 and tried to make paintings of them then. I never really finished them though because I felt that I couldn't make a painting that was as powerful as the original photos. This year, three years later, and the friend that took them has since passed away, it felt like a good time to try painting them again. The paintings came out really quickly, I only spent about an hour, maybe two on each of them. It feels like the photos have been floating around in the back of my head for three years and my brain has been slowly digesting them so that when I felt that it was time to revisit them my hands just knew how to paint them. It feels like a nice way to end my time at Tyler. They are all about a foot x foot on panel.
Last but not least are my embroideries. Making these things killed my hands and tested my patience. They each have at least 50 hours of work in them. They are all 4 x 6 inches, the exact size of the photos that they are copied from. I'm happy with them. I like that they read as a photos from far away. I'm interested in making something that is such a slow process out of a snapshot which captures a quick moment. Please forgive the bad photos. You can see my reflection in the glass, I will take some better ones soon.
