After my solo show of assemblages and mixed media works a year ago, I felt tired of the mess and bother, the glue and little bitsy pieces of stuff, and decided to return to painting and drawing, focusing on technique and simple subject matter. The decision was aided by the fact that it was winter, and my “mess” studio, a closed-in garage, gets very cold…and is expensive to heat. I set up a working space in my “clean” studio (which isn’t all that clean but at least doesn’t have paint on the floor) – the “family room” of my house. And I started taking classes with Manhattan/Woodstock artist Chris Gallego, whose work I have greatly admired since first seeing it at his solo show at the WAAM. (See his art at www.chrisgallego.com). I painted still lifes, something I’ve never done before, and found it completely engrossing, especially under his expert tutelage. After an arduous painting of a plastic bag, pencil and paper called to me and I’ve now started a series of drawings…below is the first one, the subject of which is a rack of old clothes in a vintage shop in Virginia. I’m obsessed now, seeing drawings in everything. This coming weekend I’ll be doing an intensive 2-day workshop in Chris’s Woodstock studio, and I can’t wait. It’s always surprising to me how very much more there is to learn about even the “simplest” art techniques, and how much I don’t know.
A few of my new paintings follow the drawing. I’ve sold two, and one will be in NAWA’s “Vernissage des Femmes Artistes” show in Miami during Art Basel week.
Like this:
Tags: art, chistopher gallego, drawing, painting, still life, studio, woodstock
November 4, 2011 at 3:36 pm
your rack of clothes is awesome!
November 4, 2011 at 3:38 pm
I still love those strange and wonderful assemblages.
November 4, 2011 at 4:19 pm
Nice. I’ve said it before and here it is again: the knowing that the work came from the hand, that it is not a photograph, that it had great attention paid to it, draws my attention to it like a photograph would not. It gives it a magical property. It lends a feeling of creation to the work, that the object itself has been created, given life. Wonderful work.
November 4, 2011 at 4:21 pm
oops! Ms Barr’s pictures hadn’t loaded and all I saw were Chris’s work. Beautiful and everything I said before goes here, too.