Steve discusses his bister pack paintings.
Notes from the underground : Today i'm going to talk about my blister pack paintings, what they're about, why I do them, compulsion and components:
The aggravated surfaces of these works are made from recycled materials, blister packs, arranged into compelling arrangements, sometimes linear strands, sometimes layouts that recall architectural urban planning. For me they serve two purposes. One, repurposing found or discarded materials has been a theme in my work for decades. I think if u repurpose the past and make it new again u acknowledge history, responsibility, and can then look forward as well as appreciate the present. The second is about the presence of painting, the living vitality of the material. The alchemical powers of the artist. I used to make lavishly brushy oil paintings w a thick textural surface that distinguished the pieces from a printed poster, for example. The surface was alive and lively, active, had a personality unto itself. It also emphasizes the uniqueness of each piece of art. Ideally the piece would have a riveting, commanding presence. Now the collaged items help make this lively surface.
The recycled materials in these pieces, blister packs, are transparent plastic packaging that many consumer products come in, from medicine to tools to toys and so on. They r an ingenius piece of technology. Designed to showcase a product while protecting it from shoplifting and destruction by compression. A nearly invisible object that both protects and reveals, discarded upon purchase. These transparent plastic casings have their own volume and tensile strength. They are an architecture of the product. Combined and arranged with their cousins they create what evokes a community, a city scape if you will, inventive urban planning, which makes sense when u consider that we all live within the products we make. These pieces are maps of our world or future worlds. And that's just the surface.
Superimposed over the surface are geometric abstractions in primary colors, a vocabulary of clarity, solidity, the world pared down to geometry. These shapes are defined by primary colors because primaries are a shorthand for every color, as u can make every color from them. That really speaks to me, a concise abbreviation for everything, simple yet complex. All anchored by black and white, the DeStijl movement palette a la Mondrian and his pals.
They are also all roughly the same dimensions square in order to hold a space well. And the frames are artist made and colorized to enhance the pieces, are in fact part of the piece.
And for all the artists out there there's a real figure to ground relationship present ...
Of course this is just the components, the vocabulary of the works, which has nothing to do with the aggregate total. Ideally, the presented painting transcends all. I want them to exist like Rothkos, something that's moving and transports you somewhere else, a deep evocative space. I would like the levity of the palette to impart joy and hope, as that is what I feel in those colors. I would love to create an immersive room of these w my Zamboni Totems you could walk amongst and experience, seemingly, a portal of positivity.