The Holiday Season always carries with it the pressures to create small, hand held, handmade, locally inspired merchandise to sell at various local craft fairs and art walks. Coupled with that desire is the desire to do my own holiday shopping and gifting to family members. Inevitably I feel trapped by this process. As a reader of this blog you will recall the cycle. In response I started working a large piece with seemingly less commercial value.
A couple years ago I became obsessed with a vast quantity of six by six panels which a friend had gifted me. I worked myself through a variety of ideas which had been nagging at me, matriculating, and operating in their own unique spheres. I took all of the ideas that I was working with, pipes, a crude house, power lines, and drips, working the motifs into mishmash of random, semi-surreal pieces.
During this time period it occurred to me that I wanted to make a few larger pieces with this imagery worked into it. The first piece of this nature was made on boards collected from a neighbors dilapidated deck. They ripped the deck off the side of the house and left the wood stacked out front, so naturally a good portion of that wood came home with me. As I started to think about this level of ruin that resulted in my new found wood, the logical imagery to apply to these boards was the falling house imagery. The falling houses have always been a kind of response to the American Dream. They are a sort of desperate cry for a normal life (in the sense of what is sold as normal,) one free of huge student loan debt, the fight to obtain healthcare, and trying to find enough time to work on my own career while negotiating a number of odd jobs required to pay back the massive student debt that my career has incurred.
Here are a few of the first images using that imagery.
The found wood is obviously much rougher than some of these panels. That seems to affect their feel of falling and how they occupy their space. I’ve added some atmospheric color around the new houses in the big piece in order to control the environment that the subject is in a little better.
This last juxtaposition seems the most successful to me, however, I would need to at least change up the scale of the different grids a bit more than what I have thus far. I’m still working with it. It’s in that good frustration stage right now. At any rate, hope you dig the work. Keep up.
Peace
-Mike