Two Years of Drought

House paint, acrylic gel, spray paint, dry pigment on wood

When considering what I might title this piece, I had two driving thoughts. First, the piece's aesthetics brought to mind a sense of a dried up body of water, so I considered naming it "drought." But beyond just how it looks, I felt like the name needed to flow from it's history, which all on its own was a kind of drought. Namely, this piece took two years and 5-10 failed attempts to resolve it. One layer after another, parts of the painting were okay and other parts just weren't working. So this piece is the culmination of many layers of failure and success on top of one another, selectively concealing and revealing different areas in pursuit of resolution and unity.

If only you could see what the first layer looked like! It looked nothing whatsoever like the finished piece. It was just interlaced 1" stripes of intense, alternating red and green. The complimentary color clash was tremendously jarring. Though the stripes were painted over many times, you can still see some of the structure of them if you look carefully at the top half of the painting, and you can even see some of that original green revealed in the textures on the top-right side of the piece. And now, two years later, I present to you "Two Years of Drought."