Painting in 3D

I specifically bought a much sturdier frame, reinforced in the middle, because thick slabs of paint can cause the canvas to bow and buckle. I’d been doing shapes without molds, using masking tape, and I wanted to experiment with using extremely thick slabs of paint. I was hoping to make even thicker slabs, but I…

Continuing with masking tape for sharp impasto lines, this is my first attempt at doing shapes instead of stripes. It’s a cheaper canvas so I wanted to have the shape touch the frame to keep it from distorting the canvas too much. I actually mixed colors to get the pastel.

Increasingly I’m finding the most enjoyment by using masking tape to lay down big slabs of textured color. It’s quick, it’s satisfying, and the result feels weighty and some mix of precise and immediate. Much like “Exactly Two Roads”, I’m experimenting with laying a second layer slab on top. I actually wanted to try three…

Thanks to Kevin Draper for providing a bunch of bottles of paint, including some glow-in-the-dark paint which I used for two strips of this painting that took me a couple of weeks, one painstaking triangle stripe at a time. Still excited by the possibilities of being able to mask thick shapes, I tried filling a…

The painted answer to Bob Dylan’s musical question “how many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man”, I guess. The whole “making molds” thing had started to get a little oppressive, due to all the weeks of drying time. However, all my experiments of just slapping on paint with a…

I was trying a freer approach here: seeing what I could do freeform with thick bits of paint. I like the festive way this one turned out.

I got some “pourable media” thinking I needed some kind of thinning agent to have less “brushstroke” on canvas, but it turns out using water is actually better for preparing canvasses with a tone wash. I wanted to try combining pourable paint with the previous technique of molded impasto. I can’t say I LOVE the…

This is the second painting now I’ve made as a gift. This is one of the only pictures I have of it, and it isn’t the final version. I ended up painting thin horizontal lines beneath each “flame”. My own connection to Judiasm is pretty thin, but we were invited for an Hanukah celebration and…

I definitely didn’t intend this as a Ukrainian political painting before it was finished. It was a spontaneous one using tupperware containers with reserved paint mixed with heavy gel media to make sure I could correct and match previous paintings. (Definitely including Xenon Cookies.) I wanted to experiment with paint-kniving on rough shapes and then…

This is one of my favorite paintings of mine so far. It was something I did to just kill some time while I was in the basement with Jamie.