Two Men At Twilight, 2007
oil on canvas, 48" x 36".
This was my contribution to Dan Cameron's Unsung at Nicole Klagsbrun gallery in March 2007. It remains one of my favorite paintings and offered many challenges and rewards. The title is based on a Caspar David Friedrich painting Two Men Contemplating the Moon. I chose to undertake this homage to Friedrich after visiting a psychic in an attempt to contact dead romantic artists. An essay about my psychic experience was published in Peter Gregorio's Vector.
According to intuitive consultant Steven C. Robinson, Friedrich has a psychic hand pushing me towards the canvas as I paint. This painting was an attempt at creating a contemporary vision of Romanticism. My version is based less on the beauty of nature, and more on an existential vision of fleeting moments of fellowship, the magic hour, and the simultaneity of good and evil, existential romanticism. I was looking at a lot of Max Klinger at the time.
Abandoning my affections for magical realism which I enjoyed immensely during my twenties, It has become my imperative to portray crystalline moments of magic in the every day.
One of what I consider the successes of the painting is the rendering of the cemetery grass. The under painting was the most ugly mustard yellow you can imagine. Feeling possessed, I had no idea why I chose this color, and I was feeling that the painting was going to be an ugly failure. Luckily, through my patient layering of glazes, a process which I call a retrograde striptease, I was able to transmogrify the pigment and medium into grass. I do feel that this process is alchemy, and this is my attraction to this form of realist painting. Often times I'll work as if in a delirium, blindly fumbling my way through a painting, suffering through moments of self doubt and ecstasy. It is this process which attracts me to painting.
Critics of painting and realist painting do not understand this process or art because they have never suffered and broken this fever.
