I was planning on keeping this under wraps a little bit longer, but honestly, I’m pretty excited about this.

In my relatively short life as an artist, I have managed to be involved in some great shows. I’ve had the chance to hang my paintings alongside the work of artists who I really respect and admire. I’ve even gotten the opportunity to hang shows that consisted solely of my paintings. I’ve even made a few dollars along the way, and I feel really fortunate to have taken it this far, but lately I have been thinking about the next step. So when I sat down to start a new series of paintings, I did it with that in mind.

I sat down, not only with the intention of finding an interesting subject to explore, but with the ambition to push things as far as possible. To refine and develop the next series of paintings until I came up with a fully realized show. So I have been locked up in the studio for the last year, with more than a little help from the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation, working on the Private Message paintings.

It has been a while since I have had any paintings hanging locally, because lets be honest, there are not a lot of places in this city that will really let me run with my weird ideas. We have some wonderful galleries that focus on traditional painting, and we have a great network of galleries that support the more abstract and intellectually challenging stuff. My own interests tend to fall somewhere in the middle, and the harder I have tried to create paintings that bridges the gap, the more I have felt like and outsider in both of these art worlds. So when Greg at Thomas Young Gallery offered to hang the show, I jumped at the chance.

This coming February, the Private Message paintings will hang at Thomas Young Gallery in South Boston.

More information soon, along with a couple glitchy screen prints that won’t be for sale, but will be for free.

Two panels, each 30″ x 40″ – oil on panel

I am planning a full post about the latest painting soon. In the mean time, I talked to Poets/Artists Mag a little about this series of glitchy paintings. I know I have talked a bit about these pieces already, but if you find yourself wondering – “WTF is he thinking with these paintings?” – this is the best place to start. Follow the link below to check it out…

EDIT: It looks like the link no longer works, so I will re-post the text below.

Please explain the process for this work. Tell us about the series in general.

This series focuses on the disconnect between our digital, and real world lives. Since more and more of our time is spent interacting online, and photographs are no longer constrained to one (or at most, a few) copies, our images are increasingly subject to misuse by anonymous strangers. This is especially true for attractive young women, who often find their most private digital moments taking on a life of their own.

For these paintings, I asked volunteers to send me a text message, or email, with an image that they would normally intend only for a significant other to see. I take this image and crop it so that their face is hidden; so their identity is somewhat lost, and sexual nature of the photograph takes center stage. Next the image file is corrupted using a script that randomly changes bits of the code. For me, the resulting image glitch signifies the end of the useful life for this image. The point where if the image had been shared, the image would no longer be beautiful enough to be forwarded along again. This version of the image is used as reference for the first panel of the painting.

Once I have started working on this panel, the model is asked to visit the studio to sit for a more traditional portrait, exposing her face so that she can reclaim ownership of the image of her body.

Working on this series has been an interesting challenge. Because, the first image is taken by the model herself, I have no real control of the starting point of each diptych. Because the image is sent to me in a text message, it is generally fairly low resolution. Finding ways to integrate the two images into a more composed piece has been problematic. Information has to be added to the low resolution text message image and edited out of the formal portrait, so that the two paintings can meet in the middle with similar levels of detail. At this point, I am starting to figure it all out, so I’m starting to be pretty happy with the resulting pieces.

Where do you see it going?

At this point, I am just happy that most people seem to understand what they are looking at without some big artist statement. I’m planning to make at least 5 or 10 of these pieces before I give up the series so hopefully, once I have a few more, I will find somewhere to hang them all together. Beyond that, I don’t know. I have started experimenting a bit with using glitched video files as reference for another related series, so you should be seeing the first of those soon.

Two panels, each 30″ x 40″ – oil on panel

Two panels, each 30″ x 40″ – oil on panel

I never really envisioned that I would end up a realist painter.

If you had asked 20 year old me, “what do you think of realist paintings?” My response would have probably been something along the lines of, “what is the point of doing something worse, that I camera can do better and faster?”

But here I am, painting portraits that can really be described no other way. That is not to say that I went quietly down this path. I have spent a lot more time and energy coming up with ways to make my paintings more graphic, less realistic, than I would ever spend focusing on learning traditional technique.

Lately, I have been struggling with this. Feeling a bit lost with where to take my work, feeling somewhat frustrated with the paintings I have been putting out. Not to say that I don’t like the pieces that I have done recently, but it has been a while since I have finished a painting, stepped back and felt satisfied. It has been a while since I stepped back and said, “yeah, that’s it.”

Now I am posting a piece that I really am satisfied with. A piece that I am truly excited about. A piece that is, by far, the most realistic painting I have ever done.

I finally decided to take my own advice. To get out of my own way and let the painting decide how it needed to be rendered. Instead of forcing my ideas about what makes an interesting painting, onto pieces that those ideas do not make sense for.

Portrait From Web, Portrait From Life #1