Joy

My recent focus has been on the transformations we go through in life. I wanted to show how true joy can get covered up or pasted over with the demands of one's own life, or via the pursuit of fleeting happiness. To give each event a focused energy and mount of time for meditation; resulting in a healing and restorative effect.

The Concept: Joy gets covered up, but reveals itself again.
The visual effect of Joy being embossed from beneath the surface of these paintings, was achieved by masking a textured plywood wall with a smooth cut-out of the Joy design. I placed the loose or prepared linen canvases on the wall, over the design, and began painting and roughing up the surface with slightly-increasing amounts of force. After multiple passes with brushes, rough rags and other marking tools were made, the cut-out's edges begin to reveal themselves in the painting's surface. The more the surface was worked, the more that Joy re-presented itself. This process was very physical while also being meditative in nature. The surprise and delight in this process was that the more I worked the surfaces the more Joy took on the role of a smooth and defined oasis amidst the textured chaos around it. Below are the nine paintings that resulted from my first iteration of this very powerful and profound exercise.