27″ x 72″ acrylic on canvas

Painted on loose canvas while I was a resident at the Contemporary Artist Center, Woodside in Troy, NY in November of 2012.

This paintings is available on Etsy.

Order prints and other merch at Bluecanvas.

I’d love to hear your comments below.

33″ x 26″ acrylic on canvas

Painted on loose canvas while I was a resident at the Contemporary Artist Center, Woodside in Troy, NY in November of 2012.

This paintings is available on Etsy.

Order prints and other merch at Bluecanvas.

I’d love to hear your comments below.

33″ x 26″ acrylic on canvas

Painted on loose canvas while I was a resident at the Contemporary Artist Center, Woodside in Troy, NY in November of 2012.

This paintings is available on Etsy.

Order prints and other merch at Bluecanvas.

I’d love to hear your comments below.

~50″ x 42″ acrylic on loose canavs

I haven’t really said much about my experience at the Contemporary Artists Center Woodside in Troy NY. I was there for two weeks in November 2012. The previous two posts (“Never Going to be Able to Have an Idiot Behind the Machine” and “She Says He Was a Con Man”) are both from the residency, as are six as yet unpublished pieces. It was my first residency in the US, after one in Romania in 2011 and one in Italy in 2012. The European residencies were wonderful. All I had to do was show up, they provided me with places to sleep, wonderful food to eat, materials to make art out of, and a good deal of camaraderie amongst the artists. CAC Woodside provided a place to sleep. And even for that I had pay a couple hundred dollars per week (even with a merit fellowship). But, I figured it would be worth the expense to see what it’s like to do a residency in the US.

I do genuinely think that CAC Woodside was a good experience for me, and I might do it again sometime, but it was difficult. In Europe people are very free in expressing when they like something. At CAC Woodside the artists with very low opinions of my work were much more vocal than those who liked it. We had weekly critiques and one criticism I heard over and over again was that my work too busy, that it was too colorful, that there was no place for the eye to rest. One of the other artists even called it “vomit and diarrhea on the canvas.” Well you know they have more degrees in the visual arts than I do and it’s a valid criticism. I do tend towards putting everything into a painting and not leaving a lot of empty space. So I worked really hard over the course of a handful of paintings to tone it down and let some air in. “Breaking Through by Pushing Back” is the culmination of those efforts. I don’t think the critical artists at CAC liked it at all, but I do think it is a breakthrough for me.

In this painting I have actively pushed a lot of the activity behind a hazy layer of white such that it feels like it’s muted by a layer of fog. I was looking at a lot of traditional Chinese drawings (eg: 1, 2) and drawing inspiration from the relationships they were able to achieve between foreground and background using the fog as an intermediate layer.

This painting is currently under negotiation, but you can still buy prints at Bluecanvas or download a poster-printable jpeg to do with as you please.

~21″ x 33″ acrylic on loose canvas

This is a little painting I made while on residency at the Contemporary Artists Center in Troy, NY in November.

This painting is available for sale on Etsy!

~21″ x 33″ acrylic on loose canvas

This is a little painting I made while on residency at the Contemporary Artists Center in Troy, NY in November.

This painting is available for sale on Etsy!

48″ x 72″ acrylic and newspaper on canvas

“Sun day Styles” incorporates pieces of the New York Times Sunday Styles section. You can make out the word “Sun” in the upper left and “day Styles” in the lower right. I find these colors quite soothing, like an impression of sunset from the bottom of warm lake fed by a volcanic hot spring.

I’ve been getting Sunday delivery of the New York Times for over a year now, but I only get the paper delivered because it turns out to be less expensive to subscribe to the Sunday Times and get free digital access than it is to simply pay for digital access. I guess they think they’ll convince people that they really want to access their news via thin sheets of poor quality paper printed in inks that smear all over your hands. Most weeks, I’m somewhat reluctant to admit, the papers never make it out of their little plastic baggies. I save them, sometimes, thinking they’ll be useful in the studio. And they are, I use newspaper to transfer bits of paint from one part of a canvas to another, or to sop up puddles when I make a mess of things. Recently I’ve been thinking about incorporating bits of the paper into my paintings. This is perhaps the most successful example so far.

To the left of “Sun” is a scrap of blank newspaper. Together they make a nice area of contrast with the black form behind them. To the far right there are two rather large segments, featuring smaller print and a photograph which has largely been obscured with black and white biomorphic forms. I like those two segments because they really fall right into the larger composition. You might not even notice them, but when you do the regularity of the printed text is a nice foil to the swirling irregular colors all around. In the middle top segment there is a whole page beneath the yellow-white. It features an add of some kind, I don’t remember what for, and shows the bottom half of a leggy model. All but her knees and the bottom of a leopard print skirt are obscured. She’s either walking into the painting or rising above it.. You can make out the outline of the page around her, which can read as a door or entryway, if you’re into that sort of thing.

I wasn’t so sure about this painting when I first made it, but now that I’ve been sitting with it for a couple months I think it has some real promise. It has bright colors but it also has soft pastels. It has areas of jarring contrast, but not too many, and it has some very nice washes and blurred out segments. Not too many dots, and not too many splatters.

This painting is available for sale on Etsy.

Prints, skins, and posters can be purchased at Bluecanvas.

Click here to download a 12MB poster printable jpeg.

24″ x 36″ acrylic on canvas

What can I say about this little painting? I think it really wants to be a part of a larger composition, but here it is, stuck, isolated, a colorful little storm perfectly contained. By that I guess I mean I wish there had been more room for some of the ideas here to work themselves out, and in truth that did end up happening in “Lisa Frank Stole My Unicorn” which came shortly after this one.

This painting is available on Etsy!

36″ x 48″ acrylic on canvas

This explosion of color was a loosing battle for much of its upbringing. I’m experimenting a bit with what I guess you could call a form of collage. I’ve been putting bits of newspaper on the canvas as I work. Sometimes I use the newspaper to transfer paint from one part of a canvas to another, or from one painting onto another painting. Sometimes I’ve been liking the way the newspaper looks when it is stuck to the canvas and I leave it there. This time I decided early in the compositional process to paste on two pages of the New York Times onto this canvas, in a sort of wrinkly fashion using acrylic paint to bind it to the canvas. Acrylic makes a really good glue in cases like this.

I thought the ridges and hills and valleys caused by the uneven application of newsprint would create interesting obstacles that could inform the composition. I think I bit off a bit more than I could chew, though, and I ended up tearing, pulling, and cutting portions of the newsprint off at various points. In the middle left you can actually see bare canvas, where that sort of lavender equal sign is. In other areas the effect is more subtle. In the end I think I ended up fighting against the texture than working with it.

This is also one of the first studio paintings I started after a two week residency in upstate New York which was immediately followed by a trip to Colorado for an exhibition featuring “Don’t Hold More than You can Stand to Carry” and “Slow Dive” (which won second place!) and Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years travels. So, I was working through a lot of haven’t been in the studio energy. Not that I’m making excuses. I think it is a solid piece, it just makes me a little uncomfortable.

click here to download a high resolution poster print jpeg (12MB)

This painting is available on Etsy!

Get a print, card, postcard, iPhone skin, or laptop skin on Bluecanvas!

Send me an email (blake [!at!] blakebrasher [!dot!] org) if you’d like to arrange a studio visit. I’m in Cambridge, MA.

48″ x 72″ acrylic on canvas – click to enlarge

This is a prime example of what I have come to refer to as my Lisa Frank pallet. I mean no disrespect to the artist and commercial empire of the same name, famous for their colorful stickers, Trapper Keepers, and other incredibly popular merchandise from the 1980s and 90s. Really it’s just the pinks and those weird crying rainbows.

This painting is available for sale at my Etsy store.

Prints, skins, and posters available at Bluecanvas.

Or you can download a high resolution poster print jpeg (12Mb) and do with it as you please.