found objects, paint, sand on wooden fence
34 x 60 inches APPROX (irregular surface AREA and border)
August 2022
Stuck in the Mud was created in late summer, after the fretful heat of July-August during which I produced Earth’s surface c. 2030. I had begun working with heavier solids, but had mostly kept to sand, stones and other inorganic materials. Since working on Burnout I was ready to approach my material selection with more discernment. Named for the song by Isiah Rashad, Stuck in the Mud (feat. SZA), this work was begun when I felt the need to build something and break something at the same time. It pushes the boundary between painting and sculpture further than I had in Burnout, bublgum or CaribSea and invigorated my thinking on building aesthetic structures with anything and everything from trash to data.
Method:
I began with Styrofoam, old linseed oil containers, netting and newspaper. A piece of old garden fence, was used as a support and the frame that would have been the top of the fence, became the right-hand side of the structure.
After the first paint pour, the materials were added; styrofoam built the structural base into which the bottles, netting and crushed newspaper were placed. Layer after layer of pink then red then black paint mixed with sand between layers of materials, and soon the fence disappeared under a highly irregular, somewhat homogenous structure. The crushed newspaper especially fragmented the surface quite heavily, with no point of perspective, dividing the large surface area into small, irregular planes at various angles, inclines and inversions.
Such heavy subdividing of a plane created surface area; instead of the roughly 34 x 60 inches offered by the fence, there is a considerable expansion of physical depth and volume.
Materials/ techniques
Working in physical space, bringing the surface of artworks off the plane into 3 and 4 dimensions is my progression toward conceiving of an object as an abstract representation of its components. This is an area of experimentation I intend to explore further as it relates to building representative models.
Conclusion
Stuck in the mud pushed beyond my previous experience in how to combine materials. Using paint and sand as the binding for various objects to be combined into a single solid structure was a step towards painting as sculpture.