Roads oil and acrylic on baltic birch 19x23
This is a larger piece that I recently completed for my painting class. The assignment was to incorporate screenprinting with oil painting. Working on a larger scale is kind of new for me, and I like it. I was definitely out of my comfort zone on this one for a lot of reasons - abstraction instead of painting from observation, a first time for screenprinting, the larger scale, gouging into the surface of the painting to explore different effects, the subject matter, etc. This one's about the roads we drove in Iraq and the IEDs that we encountered or, perhaps more importantly, the ones we didn't encounter. It's taken me a while to find the visual vocabulary to talk about this stuff, and I'm still very unsure of what it is I'm trying to let out. Perhaps that's why I chose abstraction over representation - the picture just isn't that clear. I don't imagine I'll make a ton of these paintings, but it's nice to let a little out and see how the process translates the thoughts I have about that time.