Prints and Posters are available here under prints.
Most new work and updates can be found at www.joeforkan.com
Prints and Posters are available here under prints.
Most new work and updates can be found at www.joeforkan.com
My exhibition of the Lebowski Cycle at the University of Arizona Museum of Art ended recently. I got to wrap it up the week before by giving a talk about the work for a nice crowd at the museum. Great to have the work up in Tucson and to see so many old friends at the talk, including my favorite professor from my undergraduate days, Classics professor Dr. David Soren, whose classes I took at UA back in 1987 and 1988! A real treat to catch up with this brilliant man after all that time. (I’m showing my age, because it didn’t occur to me to take a selfie with him…)
The lecture was fun for me, (what’s not to like about talking about painting, and a big body of work I spent 5 years making)? It was much easier, and a lot more effective, to talk about the paintings when they were actually in the room. Talking about paintings from slides somehow does not have the same effect.
In my lecture, I was going to explain how growing up in Tucson was responsible for my love of color as a painter. I think the sunsets that whole week explained it a lot better.
The installation shots really help to give a sense of the scale of these paintings. So much of what I was after here was the impact that the old master narrative paintings have because of their size, their physical presence, which never translates in photos or on the internet.
It was great to have the work up at the University of Arizona, my alma mater, in my hometown. That had a nice symmetry. Thanks to everyone at the Museum, and to everyone who came out for the lecture. Thanks to Eric Stoner for the installation & lecture photos.
The University of Arizona Alumni Magazine just published a nice piece tied to my exhibition of The Lebowski Cycle at the UA Museum of Art. It’s great to have the paintings up at the UAMA in Tucson (through Sept 25th). Thanks to Margaret Regan for writing a great article and Jacob Chinn for the great photos.
http://arizonaalumni.com/article/lebowski-cycle
The University of Arizona Museum of Art in Tucson, Arizona is hosting an exhibition of The Lebowski Cycle in the museum’s Main Gallery from May 28th through September 25th, 2016.
The exhibition will include all 15 of the large-scale oil paintings from the cycle.
An opening reception will be held on June 2nd from 5-7 pm at the museum.
I am particularly looking forward to this show, as I largely grew up in Tucson, and received my BFA in Studio Art from the University of Arizona. The UA Museum of Art was also the first art museum I went to when I was young, and it will be great to have my work shown there.
Last year I began started teaching a drawing class on Heads and Hands at CSU Fullerton. I ordered a couple of skulls for the class, and had also been experimenting with some new paints (trying some different lead whites from several different makers – needing to find US sources now that the EU has gotten so skittish about lead white). So when the skulls arrived, I jumped into a couple paintings from them. I set up the first one in a very dark corner of my studio, and the second I placed near a north facing window, mostly just looking at color and form.
The paintings are largely about color, paint, and close looking.
These are 2 of the 3 paintings included in Fleshed Out, a group show at Q Art Salon, in Santa Ana, CA, on view from Dec. 5 – Jan. 1, 2016.