So none of these were making my day so I going to take them apart and have fun.

The above photo is one of the five or so canvasses that were going nowhere.

So after two years of messing with the five that did not make it, I decided that I needed to finish this whole thing up as I was moving beyond where the old drawngs were, so I dragged all five of the canvasses outside and started a sort of deconstruction or a freeing up.

Working gesturally is hard to do larger than 1. you can see with your eye and 2. you can reach with your arm (and hand). This is where painting and dance collide. Making smaller work seems to be easier and I think that trying to make exspansive gestural work has always had inherent problems. Remember that a gesture is the conveyence of an emotion using a part of your body.

The Red Dress

The Red Dress started as a drawing of a seated figure from a chair or clothing advertisement. It was a black and white photo but I liked the pose and used it for a lot of drawings. I did a series of charcoals and then using the the same pose did some small gestural works 8X10 inches in guache using the same pose. One of the works was chosen as a commissioned painting 48X42 and I started five or six canvases because to make a larger work of a smaller gestural work is just asking for trouble.

Above is one of the smaller drawing/paintings on rag board and on top is the finished commission

Art from New Guinea


I have always intuitively known that other cultures also dealt with abstraction in their art and art making. I was pleased to find such a blatant example of it in this exhibit in San Francisco at the De Young Museum across from the Legion DE Honor...two beautiful art museums that I always enjoy visiting.

I liked finding that anthropomorphizing sticks and stones seems to be central to living amongst them but to do it in an abstract manner seems to give room for an inner life and a place for, or ground for the idea of sympathy with all things.

This has always been a theme that is central in my artwork. There is the narrative and I feel that that is important but I want my artwork to lift the narrative as a thin veil and simultaneously link one to their geography and their sympathetic ground. This is never a sure shot when it comes to making artwork.

Working with the body (Gestures) and with the materials of art, this can be a tentative affair.

Chapel Hill/Carrboro 1-2012

The Resplendant Torso

The Art Of Steven Silverleaf

Yee Haw

I don't know what to say

Tonight I am listening to the Jefferson Airplane and I have been listening to them for forty years.

Thinking about collage and the layering and the fact that like the Chinese concept of "face" there is always an element of that which is turned away, from view and that is hidden and the chance, the possibilities inherent in what might have been.

The analogy might be that all music I listen to now is heard against a collage of what I heard many years ago and what I heard twenty minutes ago and what I never listened to, what I never heard or even heard of.

I am not speaking of regret here. Sometimes when I am putting collages together and I go to adhere the glue to the side that is going to be turned away, there is regret, a beautiful passage of paint to be laid down, never to be seen.

No I am not speaking of regret. There are always new possibilities to be shown to the senses, that come to light, that tease the airwaves anew.

They start as a trickle, down the mountain and become a rushing torrent. You decide.

collage happens the same way.

primaries

I guess this is my first blog entry and I will be learning and getting more up to speed as I get more with it. I was listening to American Beauty by the Dead and "The thoughts are all broken" from the song ripple came to mind as a metaphore of my collage process and the studio floor pictured above.