Evolution of painted wood
Architectural refuse is my favorite material, specifically painted wood. I’m drawn to the embedded history in this ubiquitous resource, albeit one that is often anonymous given its found nature. Over the past two decades, I’ve collected an abundance of wood from home renovations, teardowns, and other sources, often from piles sitting on the side of the road that are waiting to be collected and conveyed to the dump.
Inspiration for my abstract compositions is derived from disparate sources including, but not limited to: quilt construction, botany, geological phenomena, vestigial appendages, basketry, architecture, color field painting, literature, popular music, and personal family history.
Below is a selection of these pieces showing the trajectory from earliest to most recent.
peel | 1999
return | 2000
flying | 2001
cicada | 2001
hop frog | 2000
prong | 2001
two architectures | 2002
Welded steel, turned and burned wood piece lap-jointed to a re-barked branch, brass pins
pistil | 2001
Playfully titled to allude to the swell of the ocean, and/or the old-fashioned way of saying something is hunky-dory. The shape might be interpreted as waveform, or perhaps a whale surfacing.
swell | 2002
My reimagining of billboards as something more visually appealing than what we are constantly inundated with here, there and everywhere.
These forms were also inspired in part by the stilted architecture of the Gulf Coast region.
hither, thither, & yon | 2003
An experiment to see how much I could distill color and texture into a series of constrained/minimal forms, as well as highlighting the relationship between painting and sculpture with a repetition of constructed ‘canvases’.
4” x 5’ each
seven paintings | 2003
crazy diamond | 2003
dervish | 2003
tad | 2003
This title is borrowed from hotrod culture: a sleeper is a vehicle that looks unassuming from the outside but is built to perform…it will win off the line in a street race.
The sculpture looks like a slug but is also sleek and aerodynamic.
Veneered found painted wood over shaped plywood substrate, approx. 6 x 60”
sleeper | 2003
An exercise in creating flow through faceted curvature and elevation shifts.
flotilla | 2003
A meditation on subdermal pictography.
Ebonized and found painted wood, 1 x 4’.
tattoo | 2004
Cross-pollination of nature and an element from car culture.
Graphite on pine, found painted wood re-barked onto tree branch, approx. 11’ long.
dipstick | 2004
These little guys (12” high each) are an homage to my Uncle Mike’s deep-sea fishing tales. When he and his friends caught tuna off the California coast they would cut the heads off the big fish and leave them standing on the deck of the boat, calling them Guadalupe stump fish…gruesome perhaps, but the vivid imagery and euphemistic handle immediately inspired these forms.
guadalupe stump fish | 2004
This was my thesis piece for the exhibition of Kansas City Art Institute class of 2004 graduates. It’s a self-portrait (approx. 6’ tall) that was intended to be a sort of abstracted water tower form, slouching or melting. I became interested in the water tower icon in thinking about the physiology of the body’s high percentage of water content.
As a result of spending over a month constructing and veneering this sculpture, I threw out my back, and couldn't cover the entire surface as planned. The silver lining was a possibly more dynamic surface, a ‘poured paint’ effect that reveals the understructure’s construction method and incidental markings.
The experience of hurting myself caused me to reevaluate making such heavy pieces…the result was an exploration of light basketry forms, beginning with spoor [see image to the right].
The title came when my buddy left a note in my studio (“Hey dood, I came by…” ); I liked the palindromic spelling as related to my last name.
dood | 2004
This form came out of the notion of removing the interior support structure to cut weight, leaving only its skin or exoskeleton. Veneered found wood was zip-tied together to make a 5’ diameter spherical piece.
The sculpture was accepted into The Big Show (Lawndale Art Center, Houston) so I threw it into the back of my truck to take it there and loosely strapped it in. As soon as I pulled out of my neighborhood and picked up speed on a busy thoroughfare, the sculpture flipped out of the bed (!!) and bounced behind my truck on its tether. I pulled over and put it back in the truck, amazed that it was unscathed…paradoxically, because it was so light, it blew out of the vehicle but also was unharmed because it was springy.
Important lesson learned about transporting lightweight, sail-like art pieces…
spoor | 2004
exquisite corpse | 2005
p-shift | 2005(outdoor)/2006 (interior corner)
ockham’s tongue | 2009
Inspired by the theory Ockham’s Razor, which states that the simplest explanation is often the best, this sculpture explores the complexity of language. Danger and propaganda are addressed in the mash-up of a guillotine blade and a billboard, parsing the notion of a “sharp tongue” with minimalism’s reductive scalpel.
![This sculpture was one of my first forays into working with the public to produce a piece. It took the premise of the first zip-tied strip piece, spoor [see above], and scaled it up to just over people-size. It was made at Free Press Summerfest! the…](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5eb25afd130a7a67ee3cc1b0/1603859493773-B5K4G6OIKOYPOGBJWXPK/IMG_0080.jpg)
This sculpture was one of my first forays into working with the public to produce a piece. It took the premise of the first zip-tied strip piece, spoor [see above], and scaled it up to just over people-size. It was made at Free Press Summerfest! the first year the Flaming Lips played there…I knew that Wayne Coyne would frequently get inside of an inflatable bubble and roll out on top of the crowd while performing, so I was geeking out hard on this fantasy that when my sculpture was completed, I would roll it to the stage they were playing, the crowd would surf my sculpture overhead all the way from the back right up to the band, and the Flaming Lips would be so wowed that they would want to find out who made the piece and then Wayne Coyne would become my new best friend. Well, my bubble was burst (literally) when, immediately upon starting to roll the completed sculpture, the ball collapsed under its own weight. I learned a crushing lesson that day about the ratio of the wood thickness to overall size, and the tradeoff between bendability and strength.
I’m still holding out hope that I may someday have occasion to meet Wayne and tell him that tragicomic story…
A meta-exploration of the idea of a paint drip rendered in dry paint strips, and an incremental but important shift from the rudimentary sphere into more dynamic lattice forms soon to come… [see further progression of woven wood pieces in Installations section]
they lifted up the sun | 2011 drip | 2012
dewclaw | 2012 Mt. Greylock, 13 Nov. 1946 | 2010 plica semilunaris(nictitating membrane | 2012
sunbursts | 2012
billboards | 2012
billboard | 2012
core samples | 2012
wooddauber | 2012
specter | 2014
duven | 2014
top shelf | 2014
spray (dead flowers) | 2014
Extraction of the silver lining from the edge of my recurring cloud form. An exercise in veneer-bending and an experiment to see what happens when the sculpture is reduced to an outline that frames the wall behind it, changing the vernacular of the artwork by de-centering it pictorially.
Also a play on a spray of dried flowers as precipitation, with the parenthetical title borrowed from the Stones. The song of the same name has a jaunty melancholy to it that I’ve always liked, a sort of decadent nihilism that Mick and Keith do so well.
These pieces came out of the interest in lowering my carbon footprint further—on top of collecting found wood—by using as much of the waste material from my studio as possible rather than throwing it away. I realized the drops (odd-shaped plywood cutoffs from other projects) would be an interesting substrate for randomly-generated pieces. Furthermore, it was a fun direction to explore quick colored wood compositions confined to a small surface area, a mutation/continuation of the thesis behind seven paintings [see image above in this section].
chunklets | 2014
tropical depression | 2014
There’s something wonderfully ironic about that phrase—one we’re all too familiar with on the Third Coast—which encapsulated my feelings post-divorce from my first wife. As a title it served as the perfect oxymoron for my emotional state, simultaneously devastated and elated.
With the form of the piece I meant to evoke the chaos of a storm system, overlaid on a shaped panel that could be read as an excerpt of the land dipping down toward sea level.
camh | 2014 circular logic | 2015
fisticuffs (miss match) & speaking stick | 2015
This piece honors the memory of my mentor Lee Littlefield by re-presenting vestiges of his studio in a posthumous collaboration…something I wish I’d instigated while he was living. The painted hardvines beneath the plinth are meant to invoke the sensation of sleep as it overtakes a body, creeping up on countless silent feet.
slumber | 2015
Another exploration of artwork as frame/frame as artwork, with the notion of co-opting the wall and shifting it from support/background to featured aspect of the sculpture. I like the idea that it captures whatever wall it is displayed on and directly implicates it in the art.
Titled after the ELO song of the same name.
Found painted wood, custom pyrex tubing.
mr. blue sky | 2015
interval in sunlight | 2015
This piece in its original form involved a garage door opener that would move the cloud down the wall, momentarily revealing the circular yellow neon hiding behind it, before returning to rest and obscuring the neon again.
The title is borrowed from a Ray Bradbury short story that examines the psychological tension of a codependent relationship.
the frankenstein method | 2015
venetian | 2015
cousins | 2015
sonrisa | 2015
from apex to zenith | 2015
new range | 2015
picking toadstools without a field guide | 2016 [collaboration with Alex Larsen]
parade | 2016
our corner of the moon | 2017
monster under the stairs | 2017
down escalator | 2018
emblem | 2018
BUT I DONT HAVE AN INSIDE VOICE | 2019
scum angel | 2019
green thumb | 2019
constellation | 2020
parceling the sky | 2020
Vintage suitcase, found painted wood, silver paint, staples
have a nice trip, welcome back | 2020 [collaboration with Alex Larsen]
rowhouses | 2020
introvert | 2021