HOMAGES
Top: Peasant Carrying a Sack, acrylic on canvas, after Millet, 1995.
Above: Millet Peasant With False Mondrian, acrylic on paper, 1998. |
Over the years I have often made direct or indirect reference to an artist from another era, be it an anonymous illuminator from the Middle Ages, a Renaissance master, or some important--or not quite so important--figure from modernism. I use the word "homage," but I mean it in the broadest sense possible in works in which my sincere regard for an artist's achievements may turn toward the satirical, the ironic or the punningly humorous . My homage may key on a particular stylistic trait, adapt some characteristic figurative element or attempt to assimilate a technique. Or it can often pile one homage upon another, doubling up on the references. In Peasant Carrying A Sack (left), for example, a Millet peasant is accompanied by a Fragonard landscape--or rather my loose and vague interpretation of a Fragonard landscape, I understand that some inattentive viewers won't pick up on the feathery brushwork and cool tonality as an indication that some rococo painter has invaded the sturdy world of a Millet peasant. But, no matter. By my thinking about these two artists simultaneously and working out the contrary ideas they espouse, I am able to gave the resulting painting a different spirit than if I had attempted to echo one or the other alone. I also liked the idea of the humble French worker being set within the privileged landscape of the French aristocracy. Generally speaking, these pieces are composites of a kind, the joining of one sort of pictorial matter with another, quite different pictorial matter. As always, I make a valiant attempt to create a convincing conjunction of subject-matter and the formal arrangement that supports it.
The coupling of two different artists that happens in a number of pieces doesn't necessarily make any logical sense--or maybe I should say never makes any logical sense. How, for example, do Mondrian and Millet wind up in the same picture as happens in Millet Peasant With False Mondrian (left)? And it's a Mondrian that has become unaccountably sun-drenched by yellows, russets and sky blues--a color condition that Mondrian would no doubt have found abhorrent in a painting. What drove the painting for me was the jostling of two dissimilar ways of handling space: "aggravated" flatness on one side and subverted representational illusion on the other. |
Van Gogh's Bedroom, acrylic on canvas, 2014. The center portion of Van Gogh's Bedroom is an enlarged interpretation of a sketch from one of Van Gogh's letters that detailed how he wanted to position one of his versions of La Berceuse between two of his sunflower paintings. Above and below this strip, in mirror image, are freely painted takes on an X-ray of the floor in Vincent's Bedroom in the Maison Jaune, 1888. 
Here's to you, Vincent 1, oil and collage on canvas, 2015. Private collection, Buffalo, NY. (Two smaller versions of this image in acrylic and pencil on paper, 2020, are available)
The one who offers the toast is none other than Joe E. Brown, a nearly forgotten comedian known for his gigantic mouth. 
Left: Van Gogh as A Ked (after Roy Lichtenstein), 3-D overlays of collaged digital print and acrylic, 2014. (Not Kid, as you might suppose) Taken from one of the few existing photographic portraits of Vincent Van Gogh, I took the artist's solemn face and combined it with extraneous elements. There's Roy Lichtenstein's painting of clustered sneakers, an anonymous stripe painting and a hint of a De Kooning snaking around in the background. In the piece below, it is an eroded dot pattern that disturbs the staid photograph. 
Left: Vincent With Dots, archival pigment print, 2014. 
Left: Nixon In Vietnam (after Rembrandt), acrylic on paper, 2002. Prices for a work on paper, $1800; for a print $350 to$500; Van Gogh's Bedroom, $3500; Millet's Butter Churner, $1100; Millet Peasant With False Mondrian, $1500; Peasant Carrying A Sack, $1900.
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Only Top: Dutch Love (after Vermeer), acrylic on paper, 2001.
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