I recently participated in the Facebook Art challenge (artists on Facebook posting 3 images each day for 5 days). I put up some work I hadn’t posted before, and decided to post it to the blog as well. Here are some early pieces from the late 90’s. These are from a series that I did thinking about the mutability of memory. I painted these using old, vernacular photos – mostly thrift stores finds, as a starting point, and also used a few photos from some very old family photo albums.

These paintings were initially blocked in with spray paint on wood panels with about a dozen coats of gesso on them. The images were then worked with a power sander, sanding blocks, clay tools, sculpture chisels, thick oil glazes and impasto.

The process got repeated until the surfaces were pretty tortured. Most of them were then screwed into massive, welded, rusted angle iron frames. The big ones must’ve weighed more than 60 lbs. Really stress tested the gallery walls…