Was in a conversation last night about some recent work, and the conversation turned to influences. If you’ve been keeping up with the poems, you’ve probably noticed a lot of Larry Rivers, Basquiat, and Arthur Fischel turning up in my work lately. What’s funny is that two most recent pieces were both completely informed by Picasso.
“The Nurse with the Bright-red Hair” was inspired by a shot of Deux femmes enlacees from 1936 that I caught in a Gagosian ad for their new show, L’Amour Fou Picasso. While my color palette and approach are very dissimilar, the goal for preserving forms as route to expressive emotion was part of my goal in “Nurse” after seeing this image.
Also, my new print in-progress, “She’ll,” is an experiment as the basis for a much larger (48″ x 144″ or larger) painting and owes its proportions and structural concept to Picasso’s Guernica. This should be no surprise, as like the AbExers, Guernica is sort of omni-present in my working philosophy, but this approach was very deliberate as well. In the recent drawing and print work there is some desire to torque aspects of a neo-pop approach, with the lines and expression of Picasso or de Kooning.
One added tidbit: “She’ll” is first time I have dropped an X and an O in a painting in quite some time.
Images above are from Gagosian.com and Guardian.co.uk.