Oxygen, 48" x 60", 2010, acrylic & ink on wood panel
Hi everyone. Happy New Year! Sorry I’ve been out of touch. Working working working…
Here’s a painting I just finished. Also, I’ve started a fan page on Facebook for David Palmer Studio. If you’re on FB, stop by for a visit!
A year older, colors bolder, but same whimsy and musicality. The most optimistic sign I’ve seen this year!
Oh good! Hopefully it’s a leading indicator :-)
And Happy New Year to you Mr. Palmer.
Very nice painting. How large is it? The modulations in the blue are fun to trace as they interact with the two-tone orange background.
Hi Jay. Thanks! It’s 5 feet wide by 4 feet high. Acrylic on wood.
Last summer I used Tibet as loose inspiration while rebuilding our patio. We broke up the ugly and poorly draining concrete slab with a sledge-hammer, then reassembled some of the pieces into an irregular mosaic. In many of the gaps I planted a small ground cover plant that should fill most of them eventually, and I also inserted several wandering lines of small, red bricks, analogous to David’s lines of holes in the linoleum. Walkable art! I can’t take a picture now, it’s under snow.
David,
Happy New Year to you!
Terrific painting – transparent and opaque, stiff and loose, straight and curvy, blue complementing orange.
Maybe I’ll do a followup piece with a bunch of white in it, and call it “Steve’s Patio in January”.
Thanks, Birgit! Happy 2010.
A very striking piece, David. It expresses both a bold energy and a sense of calm. How is that possible?? lol
I’m on Facebook and will most definitely be your fan.
Hi Tree, thanks so much. I’m really happy w/ this piece, so I’m glad you like it too. Thanks for joining me on FB!
A happy painting that make my eyes happy. Thanks for posting
Hey Tree, join me on Facebook, too. I mostly say silly things, but then, what else are social networks good for, anyway.
I found David on FB and got to click “like”, which is the lazy person’s way of being lazy.
But in spite of the ease of saying it, I must say that, as with everyone else, this makes me cheerful. I’m particularly intrigued by the queen anne’s lace (or the other flower that is like q.a. lace only a member of the carrot family) — did you silk screen these on somehow? They are so realistic and the rest is so whimsically abstract that I keep dancing, as it were, between the two modes. Not to mention between the colors. And what _is_ that dangling thread with the ball on the end.
Never mind, you won’t tell us anyway. And anyway, I like it. Click –like–
Hi June, I’m not too good with plant names, but the ones in this and other recent paintings are based on photos of weeds and plants that I shot on a trip up the coast to Big Sur. They grow along the sides of the road there, and w/ sky behind them it was easy to get silhouettes.
As far as the dangling thing, I made it up, but I’m curious as to what people read into the abstract shapes. One thing I’m exploring these days is the layering of natural and invented forms, especially forms that are diagrammatic or informational in character. Seems to me that’s increasingly how we experience the world, as a sort of perceptual/conceptual layering (especially w/ mass media and the web). Glad you’re dancing between the modes – that means the piece is doing what I’d hoped.
Regarding my techniques, some of the forms are completely hand painted, others are created on the computer, digitally printed on the panel (much more precise for the geometric elements), and painted over w/ acrylics. I mask the shapes off w/ hand-cut frisket, which helps keep the hard edges. In a few cases (like the white shape), I leave the printed form alone and don’t paint over it. The dotted-line circles are punched into the wood surface using a hammer and a nail punch.
Funny you should mention screen printing. I’m not currently using it, but I just signed up for a class at the local community college, and hope to be using the process in things I paint in the coming months. I already know how to screen print (though I’m sure I’ll learn some new things), but taking a class gives me access to the facilities. Some things, like exposing and washing out the screens, are too water-intensive to do in my studio.
Thanks for the “like” :-)
The “dangling things” make me think of pure energy, captured in form and color.
I like that. Will have to put more pure energy into future paintings!
David,
I saw musical symbols, clefs, and also queen anne’s lace.
What did you mean by ‘digitally printed on the panel’? Did you project them?
David:
How are things with your surfer girl song?
I see five sorts of elements: 1) the reduced but realistic plant silhouettes; 2) the energetically organic translucent blue form; 3) the spikier, opaque white form (reminiscent of smoke from a cigarette); 4) the sinusoidal mechanical thing, dangling like a Slinky with a weight on the end; 5) the dotted perfect circles. Each has its own rhythm. It’s a little like being in a clock store with all the clocks out of sync.
But each one telling the right time.
Jay,
Is that pro-fun or profound? Yes? David’s blue tripe over my trope any day.
David,
I suppose my clock store analogy could have evoked an unpleasant cacophany, but it really meant the opposite to me. The way the elements with their different characters weave in and out is a big part of the appeal.
Though I can imagine a couple possible reasons for it, the title Oxygen seems fairly obscure. Which I guess is your usual M.O. Care to comment?
Steve:
Yes. David tripes the light fantastic and we are all troping over his feat.
Is liquid oxygen blue?
David:
How do you digitally print on the panel?
“What did you mean by ‘digitally printed on the panel’?”
__ Birgit & Jay. There’s a place next to my old studio that mostly does corporate signage, etc., and they have a huge digital printer that can print on any flat surface, up to 10 feet by (I guess) infinity. I give them an Illustrator file, and they print on my wood panels, that I’ve painted a base color on in acrylic. The quality of the printing is a bit spray-like, so for the most part I use it as an underpainting/drawing. But for certain things, like lines or solid white, it looks pretty good as it is. For the first few paintings I did this way, I painted over everything in acrylics. On this piece that’s mostly true too, but the white dangly shape looked perfect as it was, so I left it alone.
How are things with your surfer girl song?
__ Jay, things are fine with it. Thanks for remembering. We changed the name of our band to “not a bus”. Here’s a link to the web site: http://www.notabus.com/
Click on the bus to enter and hear Channel Surfer Girl.
We’re working on a second song, called Torch. last night we did background vocals. Will let you know when it’s done.
“It’s a little like being in a clock store with all the clocks out of sync.”
__ I like that!
“Though I can imagine a couple possible reasons for it, the title Oxygen seems fairly obscure. Which I guess is your usual M.O. Care to comment?”
Ha! Didn’t realize I had a reputation for being obscure. All I can say is that as I’m working on a painting, I generally get a sense of what the title should be. Once I settle in on something that feels right, I just go with it. Where the ideas come from is a mystery to me, but songs seem to show up in the same way.
Oxygen to me meant not just energy, but the breeze made visible, dancing among the weeds.
Tree, being a biologist, I have also negative associations: Reactive oxygen species are responsible for cell damage.
That’s so interesting, Birgit. Here I was thinking all good things and you see a darker vision. Very cool and very honest to the reality of life!
David,
I’ll be interested in how the screen printing feels to you now that you can reproduce digitally. I’m not sure, except with screens where changes are made that would be more difficult to do digitally, whether screen printing is any longer worth the hassle. Torn paper, retorn, might be difficult to reproduce well in PS, but almost all the other effects are more readily accessible, particularly since you have access to a good printer.
On the other hand, you might find that doing the hand work gives you an impetus and insights that you can’t get with the mechanical computerized processed. Let us know what happens.
June, there’s a physicality to screen printing, not just the process, but the surface quality, that doesn’t occur w/ digital printing. There also the ability to do improvisational layering on a large physical surface that screen printing is great at. What I’m interested in is not so much creating completely pre-planned images, but in composing on the fly.
Check our Ryan McGinness’s work:
http://www.ryanmcginness.com/
Tree,
What came to my mind were complementary opposites: Yang and Yin – oxygen and oxygen free radicals, breathing and cancer. Looking at Wikipedia, I then learned that there is a common misperception (especially in the West) that yin and yang correspond to good and evil. However, Taoist philosophy generally discounts good/bad distinctions as superficial labels, preferring to focus on the idea of balance .
David balances lines and colors, though the blue might overpower the orange a bit.
David:
Getting the question onto the right thread, I was asking what you can expect to pay for the digital printing service. Also, I’ll ask a Birgit-like question: what are the potential chemical interactions between the digital ink ( if so it is) and a given painting medium. My guess would be that acrylics would be favored.
Birgit, Yes! The West’s either/or mentality versus the East’s both/and. A bit simplistic summation, but to me a very important distinction, especially for the individual and how one views reality.
Is the glass half full or half empty? It’s both! ;-)
And I agree, the blue is very strong in this painting.
Hi Jay, the place I worked with charges $5 per square foot, plus a $125 setup fee per printing session for panels of the same thickness. I tend to print at least 4 or 5 large panels per session to distribute the cost of the setup. My painting process before and after printing is still pretty labor-intensive.
The ink is water-based, and I paint over (and under) it with acrylics, so there shouldn’t be any problem w/ chemical reactions. It’s probably more stable than oil paint, which as you know just keeps on getting more brittle over time.
David
So that would be a hundred bucks for a 4′ x 5′ plus setup, Any pricing per number of colors? I find tracing off a projected image to be backbreaking work and something that compromises my enthusiasm for an otherwise worthy technique. So digital printing sounds interesting.
Jay, that’s correct on the price. So a single 4′ x 5′ panel would be $225 ($100 + $125), but if you do 5 panels it comes out to $125 each, since the setup fee gets applied to the whole job.
Number of colors isn’t an issue, because it’s digital. I think their machine here is 7 or 8 colors. It’s very finicky about the surface being flat (no warping). They calibrate the height of the print head per job, and it will catch on the substrate and screw up the print (and the machine) if it’s not flat.
I prime thin sheets of plywood, put down a base color in acrylics, and seal them on the back. They’re thin enough that they can put double-sided tape on the backs to counter any warping. After printing, I have the panels braced elsewhere, and then I bring them back to the studio and start painting.