Oils on Shaped Wood

My shaped wood panels are different. There are many takes on this technique, although I didn’t know it when I began making these figures for a carousel that moved through Earth, Water, Fire, and Air in a one-man show at the Cincinnati Arts Consortium in the 1970s. I particularly like this technique because the pieces seem especially real to me, like low relief sculptures. They come from sketches and then are drawn in chalk on the panel, then cut, sanded, gessoed and drawn again before I paint them.

oils on shaped wood
4′ by 8′
Pushme Pullthem

oils on shaped wood
48″ x 76″
Rockinghorse Woman

oils on shaped wood
36″ x 48″
Trio

The original figures, which moved through sections of Earth, Water, Fire and Air, were damaged by smoke shortly afterwards, but I recreated them recently, and I am working on smaller cutout figures now. I particularly like to create these because they seem very real to me, like low relief sculptures. They come from sketches and are drawn in chalk, cut out, sanded, gessoed and drawn again before I paint them.

oils on shaped wood
Air

oils on shaped Wood
38″ x 36″
Water

oils on shaped Wood
40″ x 31″
Earth

oils on shaped wood
Seahorcycle

The people in the paintings often turn out to be friends of mine, although in most cases I certainly never intended it – they just sneaked in. The rider for Pushme Pullthem emerged as a friend from Louisville I haven’t seen for many years. It occurred to me after the piece was finished that you could reverse very quickly with such an animal – just have the opposite side lead.

The figures in Trio seem to recur quite often in different environments: the blindfolded figure, the person with the sun and the woman – always a woman – who knits or weaves the plant world. Strangely, none of my blindfolded people seems to have lost any vision; they all tend to be looking attentively at something, perhaps using a different kind of sight. In this case the Sunholder is not aflame or even very engrossed in it; she has the sun tucked casually under one arm. I’m very fond of striped stockings, in life as in art.

I’ve always been intrigued by the Beatles’ Rockinghorse people, Marmalade Pie or no. Obviously Rockinghorse People can’t go anywhere, so they seem to me the embodiment of leisure and peace. Somehow that got tangled up with Edwardian society women who spent their days making formal calls, so this one is dressed and coifed for gracious visiting.
oils on shaped wood
42″ x 40″
Doortoise

 

 

 

oils on shaped wood
51″ x 47″
Dharmadillo