the series continues

I have been working lately on a series of paintings dealing with ideas of domestication and containment. What I'm interested in is the way we categorize and contain things in order to be able to deal with them. House plants, various containers; I am attempting to find ways to use the most banal of objects, painted in extremely simple ways. I think of them almost as icons or symbols. References from which more information can (hopefully) be gleaned.

This started with a painting of shelves of jars, inspired by a friends comments about putting parts of their lives in jars to save for later. Having moved home to the suburbs briefly, I am morbidly fascinated by the segmentation of items in a house, surrounded by (often, too many) rooms, manicured lawns, little gated communities that make up towns. Everything is broken down into smaller, more domesticated bits. I believe that this is a form of symbolic conquest, changing (or chaining) the natural and the chaotic to something solid, nameable and commonplace.

As usual, I am not sure if all of this gets across in the individual pieces. I think that they work as a whole, but I worry that shown apart they will not be understood. But I hate the idea of doing twenty pieces all the same size and insisting that they be displayed as parts of a whole. I like all my specifically-sized paintings. This is something that can be sorted out later, though. Right now, all the completed paintings can be counted on my fingers.

I will post images as soon as I have a few amassed. In reference to the earlier post, the teaching position has been not at all what I expected, although not necessarily in a negative way. Seeing the students work is inspiring in a way, although I do sense that they are working blindly at times. There is a lot of assignment completion going on, which is necessary and what they should be doing at this point (trying to get into college and all). But I haven't found a lot of motivation for my own work from them, other than the reminder that "I'm not inspired" is a lousy excuse. I do enjoy watching them learn. I feel that I often communicate this to them poorly, but it is deeply satisfying to explain something to someone that enables them to make better art. Whether it's a new color mixed, the right way to build up a cheekbone in clay, or simply which brush to use and how much paint to put on it. And I love pointing out art history references for them, which they are seriously lacking. I think I am making connections between things that either I forgot about or had not made before. It's interesting to go back into a familiar environment, but from the other side.