Roller Paintings 2024

“Gallery 2024: Jomptien”
Oil/paper
11” x 8.5”
2024

If you want to know about how and why I created these works on paper, please see the essay attached to the gallery for Roller Paintings 2024.

What I will add here is that these were painted at my friend’s house in Jomptien, a small city in Thailand just south of Bangkok. I am so grateful to Mark for letting me turn his garage/ wood shop in to my studio for a few weeks. It turned out to be a very good place for me to make art.

Since there are so many pieces, I decided to create a gallery where you can click on the small icons and enlarge it. And just write this cover letter for the gallery rather than writing about each one.

I would like to offer a challenge to you. If one of these pieces inspires a poem or a story, please send it to me along with the screen shot of the image. I will then pull that image out of the pack and give it its own space on the site along with your poem and a credit to you. I would love to hear what thoughts and art these pieces inspire.

Click a thumbnail to make it appear as the main image. Use the left and right arrows on the film strip to click through the gallery, or click the arrows on the left and right of the main image.

“A Little Bigger”
Oil paint on paper
18” x 14”
2024

These 19 works on paper are a little bigger than the vast majority of my roller paintings. And while that might not seem like anything significant, it is. The reason is that the success of these paintings hinges on very subtle compositional pressures of one shape or form on another and against its boundaries. If those shapes are too far or too close to one another of the edges of the composition it falls apart.

Also, the scale of the mark to the size of the paper plays a large role in its success. For example, a black square that occupies the entire bottom half of the painting is going to have a very different affect if it is made with one stroke of a brush as wide as the whole painting than a series of many strokes by a tiny brush. I’m not saying bigger is better. It might be. But that depends on all the other elements working together. What I am saying is that all these pieces work together like a house of cards to create a painting that either falls flat or lights the fire of one’s imagination.

You can not simply grab a larger piece of paper and go about painting a bigger painting. It’s a whole different process. And that is where the fun is. Ultimately I want to use tools that are 4’ wide on paintings that are wall size. But for now, it’s enough to roughly double the size of my many 8.5” x 11” roller paintings.

“Chiang Mai Monsoon”
Oil/paper
12” x 8”
2024

In the low mountains that flank Chiang Mai to the northwest, there are thick forests of bamboo, camphor and teak. These forests are fed each summer by several months of relentless heavy rain. The sky is a slack bright grey much of the time but the foliage is electric green. The mud is yellow or red brown and the understory is black. The valleys and little pockets of flat areas are almost all converted to rice paddies. Amidst all this lush nature is the scrum and detritus of a restless people eager to get on with life and not sure what to do with their stuff. Garbage and abandoned junk accumulates in gulleys and in spaces … everywhere. And all the while the raucous growth of jungle plants are at war with armies of weed wackers and the tougher scyth and sickle wielders.

The slick mud seems to make its way everywhere and the rivers are choked with silt. And then, around many curves or perched on a little high point is a pristine little square with a temple or a stupa: a patch of pristine immaculately cared for if not over burdened with kitsch.

How does one possibly convey any or all of this? I could and do snap a few pics. But these little sketches in oil on paper are much closer to the whole of it.

I also occasionally write poems inspired by these small oil paintings. I invite you to do the same. If you send them to me I will add them to the website like the one directly below the gallery grid. I will give the poem and its corresponding image its own little separate section. See below.