Unshackle

About the Item: I had been making some very colorful paintings based on rings or circles that had been very well received, but my forms and brushstrokes began to tighten and feel a little restrained. So I decided to change both the forms and the strokes, and lose a lot of the color, and do something different for awhile. I stayed with simple forms as in general I am much more interested in surface and color anyway. I had been looking at the work of Philip Guston and a Gary Komarin, and their looseness and unselfconsciousness, and used them as a touchpoint to launch from. Also borrowed the concept of not painting out to the edges from Guston (Joan Mitchell and some others did this too), which renders the area of paint a sort of object separate from the canvas surface. I used house paint in addition to the usual artists acrylics in order to achieve the flatness I was looking for. Sometime you just can't beat cheap paint. I use professional, sturdy 1.5" stretchers that have a nice deep profile and presence on the wall.