ballerina's secret 30x24 oil 09 sold orisha of freshwater & pearl 36x36 sold
I am doing a series of abstract ballerinas . If you are interested in seeing my ballerina paintings please email me at badfishstudios@yahoo. I will be sending out a slideshow of completed ballerinas for sale soon. these photos of my own ballerina girl...inspired my painting, ballerina's secret
A list of mistakes October 13, 2009 "Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep." (Scott Adams)
Esoterica: There are two kinds of students--recipe takers and recipe fighters. The former listen to the instructor, try to get it "right," and often succeed in doing so. The latter strike out on their own, pay the price of rugged individualism, and fail often. In art, it's all about failure. In art, the journey outshines the destination. In art, mistakes are golden.
Evoking the mystery by Georgianne Fastaia, San Francisco, CA,
I believe that to make art with all the questions answered deprives the viewer of the joy of participating in the act of creation. I believe the self balances tenuously in the ambiguous, misunderstood spaces between people. Exploring the fragility of our connection to each other is the reason I make art.
The primary subject of my work is the existential condition. I use abstracted forms to explore the movement between the joy of kinship and our ultimate aloneness. Self-taught, the choices I make in creating each painting, exploring the border between figuration and abstraction, serve my subject: I want the viewer to feel unsure, pulled into the painting's surface and left with questions.
My work is informed by the desire to "transform the mistake." In my process, I re-use old canvases working into layers of paint, actively damaging and rebuilding the surface to give each a "history." Through this process I seek to express a more authentic concept of beauty while striving to make paintings which retain an evocation of mystery.
The Floating City: New Orleans After the Flood paintings about the world turned upside down and the longing for homeIn 2006, I responded to Hurricane Katrina with a series of abstract "flood scapes",' After the Flood. Three years later, I revisit the ninth ward with The Floating City. The impossibility of painting the physical reality of the flood allowed me to focus on the emotional reality of an inexorably alteredlandscape. My primary goal is to convey the sense of devastation and loss as well as to offer hope for the city of New Orleans.
through June 1st at the Mezzanine Gallery at Arterra
300 Berry at 5th
one block from the ballpark
Arterra is San Francisco's first LEED-certified green high-rise community. The building uses recycled materials and wood harvested from sustainable forests.
erosion 24 x 24 oil 08
A square with a triangle atop it is one of the first visual symbols a child draws. These naively rendered houses represent our memory of and longing for home. As the series evolved, these symbols of home became more elongated, abstract, and totemic while "the Flood" itself evolved into a metaphor for displacement. My challenge has been to translate this sense of loss and disembodiment into the language of paint-- texture, composition, and color.
I have given each painting a “history” through a long distressing process: scrubbing, scraping, and wiping away to reveal shadows, faded colors, and echoes or ghosts of underlying imagery. This creates surfaces in which most of the information is buried below layers of paint, visually communicating the concept of impermanence, time passing, erosion.
I use composition deliberately to reinforce a sense of our smallness against the "bigness of nature" by placing most of the information in the bottom of the canvas, dwarfed by the sky. Multiple horizon lines shift the imagery into the center of the picture plain, as if floating, with houses reflected in the sky; a composition designed to dislocate the viewer from his normal frame of reference.
The emotional use of Color plays an important part in creating mood. I use a palette of somber violets, green-grays and translucent layers of milky color to convey the quality of light after a storm, the thick saturated air that I recall growing up along the Connecticut shore.
Flooded Main Street is the transitional painting between the two series. This is a realistic painting in a predominantly abstract body of work, however, it was this haunting image which inspired me to revisit "the Flood" theme. My primary consideration is to convey the feeling of desolation captured in videos such as these. I strive for emotional honesty in my work and rely on an intuitive sense of color and an immediacy of gesture to achieve it.
Oxum orisha of beauty 36 x 36 oil 09
Oxum's dance recalls her bathing in a waterfall, and summoning the forces that control pregnancy and childbirth. The young woman possessed by Oxum dances alongside her mother.
Oxum likes beauty, and devotes her life to it. She is also the goddess of love and fertility, and looks after newborns up to the age of about 4. The city of Salvadore in Brazil is believed to be run by Oxum; it is said its people love the good things in life.
bahia salvador procession fesitival of oxum 36 x 36
ballerina's secret 
30x24 oil 09 sold orisha of freshwater & pearl 36x36 sold
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salmon leaping in the beautiful world
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