'If' - a change of pace

If
Collage and oil on mahogany
36''x36''

A month or so ago I really climbed back into the chair after taking a bit of a hiatus. I had felt pretty crunched from the series in London and had basically zero commission prospects. Feeling a bit burnt painting a particular way for sometime, I focused alot more on composition. The idea was to fracture the figure in a way that would vary its forms in order to put it in a kinetic context. I'm uncertain that this piece is overy animated but I feel this sort of structuring will eventually lead to it. Either way this illustration technique was pretty exciting to work on and I plan to expand alot on it.

Later after it was more-or-less finished, Steffen Quong asked me to participate in a show he was curating titled 'Girls With Guns' at Positive Negative Gallery. I had in fact had a piece lurking in the shadows for a while of just that, a girl with a gun. Thing is I'm not too getting involved when my work has just been recycled from something before. So I put it upon myself to get this thing in there somehow. Initially I added some exploded diagrams of guns as a linear texture but it didn't work. I realized that for the most part, the painting primarily used textures that were either rendered or of linear quality. The use of spray paint around the knee was a nice complement to those elements which led me to adding splatter as a similar complement. Now all I had to do was squeak in a bullet to loosely me the requisite and I'm in.

Coupla'bloody tests