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lunatica

(53,410 posts)
5. Oh! What a perfect treat in the time of Coronavirus!
Wed Apr 1, 2020, 02:53 PM
Apr 2020

You have been busy!

Your attention to detail is really showing now. And again you have your three separate themes in which you are increasingly developing a different painting style for each. Although you have the same basic approach to each in that you pay attention to minute details that you render so well that the viewer is compelled to slow down and absorb.

The contrast among your approaches to the subject matter is very interesting. I hope I can explain this well. Your camera paintings are showing a quality that seems to be developing into photorealism with you displaying more and more interest in and ease with including more defined and refined details. The cameras are beginning to look like they are real objects floating in space. They look more 3 dimensional even though you include their shadows. In these paintings you are deliberately positioning the cameras facing the viewer which is very dynamic in getting attention. It’s a method that creates visual tension which is a great way to grab attention.

In contrast, your landscapes are very deliberately almost the opposite. You zero in on details of something much larger which the viewer can imagine in their own. You paint the details of the natural world where objects and seasons and weather intermix to create imperfect angles and shadows interacting in random ways. Whereas your cameras are complete depictions of an object, your landscapes are only a small part of a bigger subject. They’re a microcosm of something vast and sprawling. A precious detail of nature’s chaotic sense of non geometrical structures, even as you include man made geometry like a wall in the mix.

And of course your cityscapes with all the man made angles and depictions of a time and place that is specific. A history lesson of small town surroundings, depicting the charm of things coming forward from the past. Perhaps before they get discarded for modern structures. In these paintings you again go into detail, rendering the entire scene with all it’s flaws and perfections the way you see it. Right angles and geometry everywhere and yet it’s not perfect geometry. In your Ford Piquette plant you included the electrical wire posts, all in perfect alignment to your one point perspective with all the straight and parallel lines of the buildings, the streets and sidewalks. But you painted the closest post so it was not parallel to anything. It’s leaning and disrupting the rhythm of lines all criss crossing and paralleling each other, and the effect is amazing. It brings the painting to life because that simple depiction gives the scene charm and warmth while also giving the location an aged touch. A sense of a past time gone for a while with a bit of decaying geometry. It’s warmly nostalgic of a past even as old things are being renovated and turned into something modern. You show the viewer the renovated value of what used to be considered a factory. And you show your appreciation of those old structures which our modern world thinks is useless architecture to be bulldozed and forgotten.

There is love and appreciation in all your paintings. Nothing is static or uninteresting, no matter how simple or unimportant it is in daily life.

Your fruit still life is a riot of intense colors. You explain that you just let the painting go wherever it took you. I like your journey very much, and thanks for taking me along! If you do that more often you can add a fourth theme to your style!

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