Thursday 8:22 AM
40 × 30 x1 1.5 inches, oil on canvas
In this painting I’m sitting on the edge of a bed in shorts and gray socks. There’s an empty chair beside me and a pair of boots on the floor. The room has familiar, ordinary things in it, a radiator, a window, the building across the way. I’m interested in how those things become part of our understanding of the person sitting there.
I think of this as an exercise in empathy and framing identity. I’m using my own body and domestic spaces to examine the experience of middle-aged and older men. Aging is something we all participate in, and coming to terms with it has become part of how I develop the imagery in Self Directed. The seated posture, the socks, the empty chair, and the shoes give me ways to think about presence, absence, and self-observation. There’s room for someone else in the picture, even though we only see one person.
I worked out the composition in a preliminary drawing and made a separate study of my head. Some elements changed as I developed the painting. The lace-up sneakers in the drawing became red-brown ankle boots. Their color adds another warm area near the bottom of the canvas, and their shape gives them a different physical presence. The building outside the window became more specific too. The drawings gave me a place to begin, with decisions still to make as I painted.
A lot of the underdrawing remains visible in the finished painting. You can follow it through the bedding, the floor, and parts of the room. Some areas are developed with more opaque, substantial paint, while others remain thin enough for the drawing to continue doing much of the work. I like that variation. The figure, the radiator, and the bright window have a different surface from the more open passages around them. You can see something of how the image was built.
The warm walls, wooden floor, and pinks of the skin sit against the cooler socks, shorts, and light outside. These relationships help hold the room together without giving every part the same degree of finish. I’m trying to pay closer attention to ordinary spaces and routines, and to what they tell me about where I am in my life.
Thursday 8:22 AM
40 × 30 x1 1.5 inches, oil on canvas
In this painting I’m sitting on the edge of a bed in shorts and gray socks. There’s an empty chair beside me and a pair of boots on the floor. The room has familiar, ordinary things in it, a radiator, a window, the building across the way. I’m interested in how those things become part of our understanding of the person sitting there.
I think of this as an exercise in empathy and framing identity. I’m using my own body and domestic spaces to examine the experience of middle-aged and older men. Aging is something we all participate in, and coming to terms with it has become part of how I develop the imagery in Self Directed. The seated posture, the socks, the empty chair, and the shoes give me ways to think about presence, absence, and self-observation. There’s room for someone else in the picture, even though we only see one person.
I worked out the composition in a preliminary drawing and made a separate study of my head. Some elements changed as I developed the painting. The lace-up sneakers in the drawing became red-brown ankle boots. Their color adds another warm area near the bottom of the canvas, and their shape gives them a different physical presence. The building outside the window became more specific too. The drawings gave me a place to begin, with decisions still to make as I painted.
A lot of the underdrawing remains visible in the finished painting. You can follow it through the bedding, the floor, and parts of the room. Some areas are developed with more opaque, substantial paint, while others remain thin enough for the drawing to continue doing much of the work. I like that variation. The figure, the radiator, and the bright window have a different surface from the more open passages around them. You can see something of how the image was built.
The warm walls, wooden floor, and pinks of the skin sit against the cooler socks, shorts, and light outside. These relationships help hold the room together without giving every part the same degree of finish. I’m trying to pay closer attention to ordinary spaces and routines, and to what they tell me about where I am in my life.
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