Two Saws

  

Here's some 20-year-old art.

For this blog post, I owe thanks to Chris Gilbert times two.  First of all, on one night back in the early Nineties, he very generously set up his camera in the photo lab at U of L and spent a few hours with me shooting slides of my artwork.  He was a photography student; I was not.

Second, he recently loaned me his slide scanner so that Kim and I could make digital scans of some old slides we had sitting around.  Kim scanned some old family pictures before Christmas.  Yesterday, I dug out my old painting slides and scanned them.  So thanks again, Chris!

These are slides from back when I was a student at U of L, and I think they all date to 1994 and earlier.

The pseudo-folk art I created as a joke; "The Great Louisville Earthquake" is a painting on a circular saw blade and given to my friend Mike.

The other is a portrait of the same Mike, holding a saw.  Note that I used the same saw to cut partly through the hardboard panel on which it's painted.  That's what the brown line is descending from top center.  I like how Mike appears to have just cut the panel upon which he's painted, and is inspecting his handiwork.

It's also interesting to me to look at these to see the quality of my work.  I still have room for vast improvement, but it's hard for me to understand how I could have painted in such a clumsy way as this.  It's so imprecise and insensitive.  At the same time, I admire the way I really attacked the subject.  I popped the paint on there and forced it all to hold together despite my lack of finesse.