I’ve really been looking at the work of Jon Carling. Meighan of “My Love For You” turned me onto him a couple days ago. His work makes me excited to draw like Mel Kadel’s work did the first time I saw it and like Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns made me in college.
How appropriate that he has done some bee images and I am trying to work on a Bee piece concerned with a “state of mind” or a “higher purpose” for the group show that I am participating in with the Hive.
At the same time, I am still trying to push my drawing back into my work. I miss drawing. There is something much more visceral about the drawing than there is the painting. If you are not careful with paint, as you are using it in massive volume, it can become like paint by numbers. Not good. The drawing helps me remember though, and then I know the stroke will come back in an edgier format in the paint as well.
It is all interconnected, but the one thing that I realize is that the less feeling that I have in the end product the less someone is going to identify with it. I need to “finish” pieces before I necessarily think they are done. That is the task for 2010, so if you see me overworking pieces, I want you to drop me an email, leave me a comment or just plain drop an anvil Looney Tunes style and remind me, that I am allowed to be expressive in my work.
So, tomorrow, I will have the finish of this Bee Here Now piece up. It’s going to be good. I hope you like the in prog piece.
peace
-Mike