Latest
Some Other New Videos On the Exalted Tree Youtube Channel
Omni Ninotores – “Spells From Knots”
Canyon Creek Reflections
[si-contact-form form='1']
New centrozoon Videos
centrozoon “Weak Spelling” Boner album (Adrian Benavides mix)
centrozoon “By Us” Boner album (Adrian Benavides Mix)
My history with Styrofoam painting, part 4, the pubilc piece “Marinus, Sompe, Lacus”.
“Marinus, sompe, Lacus” is a work that is on permanent display at the Eccles Science Learning Center (building), on the Utah State University Campus, Logan, Utah. I was lucky enough to get a commission to do this piece. It is a tryptic of exaggerated giant fossils, the stingray – “Marinus” from the ocean, the leaf – “Lacus” from the lake, and the mollusk shell – “Sompe” from the swamp. If I remember the meaning of those names correctly. They are each 6 X 6 feet. I mounted them on the wall with thick L bars and screws, I glued large bolt heads over the screws all to make them look heavy. There were some big Tongan men working on a sculpture in the atrium where we were installing these, when they saw us lifting what looked to be very large stone slabs with our bare hands they looked astonished. It was pretty funny. I mixed polyacrylic paint with sand on some of these to make them look more like sandstone.
_
_
_
_
My history with Styrofoam painting, part 3, surfaces and blacklight florecents.
I continued painting, with some more wall sculptural works, here is a strata which was etched a number of ways one of which was with a hot knife(the deeper straighter cuts),
_
_
and an ambient etched patterned work, this etching was done with acetone.
_
_
_
I decided to do some pieces that had differently prepared surfaces, such as using craqular paint effects such as found in special effects painting sections of the hardware store. These two were the kind that you paint the surface with a color, paint the craqular glaze on, then paint another color on top shortly after application the of the glaze, then it dries and pulls apart forming the weathered look. At the time I also became interested in the Idea of abstract Iconography, or making pieces that were like iconographic religious art but the subject matter being abstract art. I pictured these pieces being like futuristic religious works in some strange worship space.
_
_
_
In this work I involved graphic collage, where the collage elements were designed for the piece, the craqular in this one was a porcelain effect, that you paint over the painted portion and the paint a glaze that pulls apart forming cracks that you then rub a watered down tar filament that makes the cracks show up. I put the glaze on thick and the result was very cool. I learned a hard lesson in making this painting. That lesson was not to use home printed graphic from a cheap printer, the ink faded over a few years, it’s kind of sad. I would have replaced the graphics but they were masked and painted over on the edges.
_
_
I like messing with color and lighting effects, I thought it would be fun to do some pieces that would glow under black lighting, I needed to use florescent paints to accomplish this. The etching with these was done with masking with paint and heating with a heating source, an industrial heater in this case. Here are a couple of examples. These look great with spectra glasses under the black lighting as well. It glows and rises and falls.
_
_
_
_
_
_
My history with Styrofoam painting, part 2, Sculpture
The first set of these forms are pillars that are about 8ft x 1ft x 1ft. They were constructed by cutting the corners at angles on paneling and putting the angles flush to make a fine corner. I then sculpted them using largely the same processes I I did with the paintings. I built a couple of these with small speakers and a portable cd player, to cause sound to come out of the top and be a part of the installation. I found placing a the pillars over a cinder block kept them stable from falling. I did these pillars around the year 2000.
-
-
-
-
I did this first over sized fossil piece during a summer sculpture workshop in 2000 at USU, it stood 16 feet tall. It looks generally the same on both sides of the panel.
-
-
I don’t have a picture of the cube with the balls in them but this orange wall sculpture/painting is a repeat of an idea of taking objects and imbedding them into the Styrofoam. As well I started working on putting lighting in the foam sculptures, the tall grey work is one of those, the other pillar exhibited in the yard of a friend had lights in it, as well as a plasma disk opposing sides of the work, It looked pretty cool at night.
-
-
-
-
This was a sculpture I did as a tabletop piece, it has some imbedded objects.
The Stratascape piece is the largest sculpture I have done, I still have it, but I think I’m going to cut it apart to make two triptych wall pieces out of it. It looks pretty much the same on both sides.
My history with Styrofoam painting, part 1.
When I started painting my freshman year in collage I almost immediately fell in love with texture. I remember looking in an art fundamentals book at a painting someone globed, gooped, and scraped with a pallet knife. I said. “Wow that is what I want my painting to do, to lift off of the canvas like that!” I also wanted to be painting textured abstracts of rock. I have been a climber for a long time and I love the wonderful aspects of how the different rock looks in certain situations. So I worked at painting with texture using pretty much only paint, I would go and take a canvas unstretched and tape it on to a rock surface in the mountains. I would try to paint exactly how the rock looked next to and underneath it. It left me wanting. So I started to probe ways to get bigger more extreme texture. I was working at the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art in Logan in the spring of 1999, and after unpacking a piece of art that was shipped to the museum, there was this big square piece of foam. It was spongy, but I thought that hacking at it with something like a stick or a hammer could do some interesting damage, so I asked if I could take it. I took it home and beat the hell out of it! I decided it was going to be a limestone slab, so I painted it with two layers of paint, it was too flimsy and squishy, so I ended up painting it with 9 layers of acrylic house paint(I was later to figure out that using latex house paint provided a better gesso, because there were no solvents in it, this piece developed bubbles underneath the paint after a few years). It was more rigid and solid at that point, unfortunately I lost a lot of texture detail in the process. It was the ready for the artist’s acrylic, I decided to paint both sides and hang it from the ceiling. I found that trying to do this did not work that well because, well, the the foam is light, and it just swayed back and forth even with almost no breeze in a room. I later sacrificed one side and displayed it as a painting. Here is the result:
As time passed and I investigated other options with the Styrofoam, I settled on using Dow extruded polystyrene Styrofoam, it was not as weak or flimsy as the white bead board stuff. It had a solid dense, but malleable characteristic that responded well to what I started doing with it. I started doing a series for a studio class, I made several cubes, I cut layers of Styrofoam and glued them together to make a cube. A sort of sculptural wall piece. I tried carving the texture a number of ways such as , cutting with tools, including a hot knife, burning with chemicals and fire, masking with paint and using a combination of these things. Here is a couple of the cubes:
