Highchairs again Travis? Come on.....

Here is the second piece I made while in Portland. I spent a long time talking to Josh about opening up my technique, my application of medium, and my process in making work so that I could experiment more and come up with different and new ideas. I was feeling pretty trapped after my thesis and needed to just dive into something else, whether it was good or not.

Yet in a silly way, I needed a familiar friend to help me. So I went out in Portland and bought this old highchair that was also a step stool.

I was thinking a lot about pattern and how pattern can help create and flatten spatial perception when I started working. I also wanted the chair to operate in a specific space so that it responded to something other than my own intentions. One of the simplest ways that I thought of to have the chair both respond to pattern and its space was to use shadow, or how the chair sat in any space. Shadows fall on an object and make their own specific pattern depending on a number of factors (light source, brightness of light, shape of object, proximity to ground, etc.) I wanted to emphasize those natural patterns in some way. So I painted, in acrylic, the shadows that fell behind the chair on the wall and floor onto the surface of the chair, allowing local color to work its way into my painting. Eventually I wanted to add more physical texture to the shadows, so I added a bunch of thick medium to them, which gave them more of a physical life. I think that this explains the piece as much as I can right now.

Here's some photos.





Here are some outside too. The colors are truer to life.






That's all. In other news, I have been working on tracings, which I am excited about. More on that later. Also, although I am not able to wear the sweet "Nobody can fuck with my shit" pin that Claire made me for fear that the little ones will bleed out of their ears, I have been keeping it on my desk and reading it every day. I'm trying to find the guy who believed that again.

Also, I have been reading this great online arts magazine called "Triple Canopy." As soon as I have read more I will post about it. I think that you all would be super into it. For one thing, it's really well designed. At least I think it is.