A third pillar. At least seven feet high, maybe more. The wood base is 20" square. It is topped with branches trimmed from an Osage Orange. The branches are glued into holes drilled into the top, everything painted black.
I approached this one differently. With the first two I followed the spiral of the paper as it wrapped around the tube, treating it like a horizon, so that a continuous scene was created from the base to the top. On this one I didn't want to depend on that line so much. I didn't want to be quite so tight with the images, either. Nothing against the first two, I love their strength AND playfulness - that combination. But I wanted to see if I could free up the quality of the painting and make it more like my flat paintings and less of just filling in shapes with color. And I wanted to treat the whole surface as a unit and not a continuous spiral. Anyway, it was another way to try to solve the challenge of the tube as a painting and I like the way it came out.
Again, this started as a cardboard cement (or concrete? - I don't know the difference) form 16" in diameter. I coated it with gesso and used a charcoal pencil to create gestural lines in the surface before the gesso dried. I painted the yellow ochre on as a base color and then, finding shapes and lines from the charcoal, added dark tones with burnt sienna, most of which was painted over with other colors.
I took all three pillars to Bridge Gallery (Shepherdstown, WV) today, where they will be part of the summer show during our Contemporary American Theater Festival, which fills our little town with wonderful people. I thought they looked pretty great in the gallery and I'm looking forward to seeing what the public thinks! This was such a fun project.
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