Excited about this one. Back on canvas. A lot of scrapping with palette knife. I am getting quite a bit of flattening while maintaining illusion. The painting looks better in life than in this photo. I used a crayon underneath (and a bit on top) - Caran d'Ache Neocolor, they are awesome.

A couple images for today. I will give a little more specifics to what I am doing. I have been sifting through my thoughts for a more solid direction. Most recently I have been thinking about the work of Ivan Chermayeff. He is best known for his graphic design work but he also makes artwork too (search him on artsy.net). I am beginning to find a link between artwork/artists I find most interesting. Fairfield Porter: simplification into shapes that sometimes meld into each other though still reading as realism, Richard Diebenkorn: The picture plane is broken into large and small shapes and is well balanced, Matisse: Particularly the Morocco paintings, the composition comes first and in this way the painting is quickly read even though large. These are just a few examples. So this is what is going into my work. I am arranging still life objects - common objects like Morandi but I am arranging them in an unconventional way as a step to abstraction. Then I paint/draw/collage in a way to maintain connection to observation, through either contours or colors or shapes, while trying to make an almost purely abstract composition (obviously pure abstraction won't happen but I like the play between the two). I want the simplification of shapes to be based on close observation and not on something so general as making a "simplified mug shape" for example. This is the connection I find interesting with these artists - How the shapes work together to create a easily read composition.

These are somewhat in chronological order, left to right and top to bottom. Browse through the images, let me know if you have any comments/questions.

 This is my first blog post. I want to show my art work through this blog to get some feed back and keep people up to date on what I am doing. I am going to show images and write brief overviews of what I am doing. The next few images will be some of the first I have made at grad school to catch people up with what I am doing. The simplest way to describe what I am doing right now is to say that I am interested in a discussion between abstraction (particularly due to the limitations of materials) and observation.