This is the visual artists’ equivalent to practicing scales. When learning to play music, you first play other people’s music so that you can then have the repertoire to create your own. This is a stencil I made from one of Degas’ dancer paintings. By emulating Degas’ style and composition I am continuing to think through my own process.

This was done on batik paper. I think the image has a sort of Rothko effect in front of the pattern. Enjoy.

From Drop Box

It has been a while since I posted photos of new work. As of March, I had to pack up my studio on E Griffin St. It was a mutual decision between me and the artist I was renting from. I will be moving to a new space soon and will continue working. As for right now, my studio is packed up in a storage unit.

With this time of creative abstinence I’m spending time contemplating my content and expression.

I visited a Hung Liu exhibition that was in Dallas last week and was thoroughly inspired.

Someone recently made a comment to me that they thought that I am disconnected from my primary content of Afro-Caribbean images and motifs. This has been a lot to process. While I left Grenada 9 years ago now, my 17 years in the Caribbean still represent my fundamental cultural perspective. However well I may acclimatize or accommodate US culture, adaptation is not to be confused with ethno-cultural amnesia.

So what do I make? I am culturally and thematically heterogeneous in a field that prizes focus and singularity. I have painted themes of music, personalities, portraits, and figures. My philosophies and artistic direction change without warning. Currently I am straddling two styles. One, using oil paint and chemicals to create a transient effect of the human expression, and the other, a more street art style approach using adapted photos and creating stencils.

My multiplicity begs pause.

As I sit, absent of materials, I look for a muse and I am without.

I have a solo show slated in Barbados for March of 2012 and I have a lot of work to do. On top of that the questions of my content and even my market linger.

Here is the latest iteration of the stencil I made. I just put the black layer on today. All the layers are oil paint and put on by brush. There are 3 layers of stencil but 4 layers of color not including the background. The light blue/grey color showing through was the first attempt on the second layer before adding the plum color and some drips. Enjoy!

Here is another small iteration on paper. The pattern in the background is bronze rosettes.

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.

I made a few changes and I think I should be done working on this one for now. Let me know what you think.