New Work!

Thank you to all who have patiently been waiting for new work from me! I have been working on this 36″x48″ market scene for a few months and now I am finally done. All three layers, white, grey and black and can be seen in the photos below.

The concept behind this piece, besides exploring the medium of stenciling, is the underlying idea of fractals. A succinct explanation is that fractals are a metaphor for life. A persons’ daily pattern, or habits, or lifestyles repeat themselves on increasingly larger scales. A person’s day is a smaller iteration of their week, month and year. A fractal is a large pattern that is made up of infinitely smaller patterns that many times are mirror images of the larger pattern they make up.

I used a stenciling technique where I burned the shapes that make up the image out of a thick plastic. Many of the shapes when seen independently resemble coastlines and other fractals found in nature. Having spent months burning out the shapes I will now be able to repeat the application of the shapes in what I call iterations. Even the process of being able to produce more work based on my original efforts can be understood as a ‘fractal process’.

This particular market scene is a sort of fractal expression of food production. Not only is it a market scene as a whole where food is distributed but there is a a large pot in the center of the piece distributing food to a smaller amount of people and then finally there is the intimate image of a baby nursing. This intimate illustration of food production then emanates back out and portrays the marketplace as an intimate institution.

The smaller piece is done on paper that has a bronze leaf pattern in vertical columns, the larger piece is 30″x40″ and is done on canvas.