poured painting

These pieces were the focus of my first show at Kanon Collective, Parallel Lines, in 2006. The show got a favorable review in Westword, which was kind of amazing at the time. The series actually came about because I picked up a can of industrial silver at a local paint store. It was on sale for $5 and I thought it might be fun to coat some surfaces in silver. I had never worked with oil-based paint before so I had no idea what I was in for. When I opened the cat of paint, the pattern of the paint on the inside of the lid was so pretty that I decided to create some pieces with that type of paint. I picked up a few other colors and started experimenting with pouring paint in layers and creating patterns. Being that it was oil based, it took a long time to dry, which was both good and bad. The good meant that the paint has time to settle into itself and layers of color would start to peek through. The bad meant that the pieces sometimes needed weeks to fully dry, and they smelled pretty bad. But when they did dry, they were quite beautiful. This is one of those series that I probably won’t ever do again — mostly because I don’t have my own studio space that I can stink up with the paint — but also because some things are just a fun experiment and then you move on to other things. If nothing else, I got a small taste of what Jackson Pollock found so fascinating.