Aerial painting in progress and more about the aerial project

Random Aerial #1 with no city (detail 1)

Random Aerial #1 with no city (detail 2)

Above are some details and below is the 4 1/2' by 5' foot aerial that I mentioned from First Friday. This was the first painted aerial (after I’d started a couple of city aerials in fiber in 2002 and recently recombined them into this piece). I began the painted piece in 2003 while we were still living in Los Angeles.

Each of the aerials has a psychological and somewhat autobiographical component. The city pieces were a mapping of my immersion in a city the size of Ireland that is traversed almost solely by automobile. While in L.A., I drove all the time, every day and over large areas. On average, I drove about 50 miles each day and in multiple directions on side streets and freeways. After 8 years, I had the streets, the restaurants, the getaway drives, the routes to school and work and their many alternate routes memorized. So working with the labor-intensive fiber processes and with cutting and collage fit the psychological experience, if only to relive it to some extent… delays, dead ends, rerouting… all buried in this frenetic, consuming and inescapable energy.

The paintings however were part wish fulfillment and part unveiling – pulling back the skin of the city to uncover an imaginary expanse of unaltered desert ground and fantasized water. In the painting process, I draped fabric and paper over panel, laid it flat and let the paint and water settle into the hollows. Then I rubbed grease stick and oil pastel over the high points and repainted with acrylic. I repeated this process over several months before I set it aside for a couple of years and picked it up again recently with more applications of the same layering process.

With the painting, I was less interested in building representations or images on a ground or in showing my hand (as with the city fiber aerials) than I was in letting the organic processes of draping, pouring, drying and rubbing create a structure of the ground. As such, the painting became more sculptural while the fiber pieces more painterly.

As I mentioned in the First Friday post, this piece is difficult to light because of its multiple planes and hot spots. The viewer must be in constant motion around the piece to see all of it clearly – an effect I may use to other ends some day.

Random Aerial #1 (water, desert and ocean with no city), 2003-07