The tandem paintings are a series of small works that run parallel to my larger, often representational painting. I keep small prepared canvases in my studio and when I have excess paint from my larger works, I apply it to these smaller surfaces that become the tandem pictures.
They begin with leftover mixes of paint-- thin washes, or heavier paint blended with a variety of oils, waxes, and mediums or palette scrapings. These are applied to small canvases by brush, knife, trowel or spatula-- the tools at hand. This, then, begs a response initiating the call-and-answer process of building a painting. The paintings offer a free space where I do not set out to achieve anything specific, but let the process unfold. I work on them in spare time or as respite from the larger works. As a result, they encourage freedom to experiment, invent and play.
Because they are made in tandem with the larger work (in an adjacent headspace) and share the same studio walls, tools, and mixtures of pigment; they advance painterly concerns relevant to the rest of my practice. Their discoveries feed back into ongoing and future pieces. But they also stand alone with their visceral, material qualities; where paint is stuff of the world and resists codification. To echo French philosopher, Maurice Mzerleau-Ponty, the act of painting becomes an "...emblem of a way of inhabiting the world, of handling it, and of interpreting it... the emblem of a certain relationship to being...."
They begin with leftover mixes of paint-- thin washes, or heavier paint blended with a variety of oils, waxes, and mediums or palette scrapings. These are applied to small canvases by brush, knife, trowel or spatula-- the tools at hand. This, then, begs a response initiating the call-and-answer process of building a painting. The paintings offer a free space where I do not set out to achieve anything specific, but let the process unfold. I work on them in spare time or as respite from the larger works. As a result, they encourage freedom to experiment, invent and play.
Because they are made in tandem with the larger work (in an adjacent headspace) and share the same studio walls, tools, and mixtures of pigment; they advance painterly concerns relevant to the rest of my practice. Their discoveries feed back into ongoing and future pieces. But they also stand alone with their visceral, material qualities; where paint is stuff of the world and resists codification. To echo French philosopher, Maurice Mzerleau-Ponty, the act of painting becomes an "...emblem of a way of inhabiting the world, of handling it, and of interpreting it... the emblem of a certain relationship to being...."
