PAINT Submission

I just submitted First Born and Two Monumental Mistakes, One On Purpose to Manifest Gallery's upcoming exhibition "PAINT." I like the concept of this show and hope my paintings can add a new or uncommon perspective on how to make a "painting." Here is a description and the prospectus. The deadline is January 22.

Painting is something humans have done for millennia. The media has a lineage not unlike our own, evolving and accumulating like the culture that bears it. Yet like so many aspects of civilization, we take it for granted. For example, people don’t realize that numerous pigments are extremely toxic, not just the fabled ‘lead white’, or that in antiquity a pound of royal purple dye required the crushing of four million mollusks (and that the color purple was worth the trouble-- to the Romans).

As art spread like a virus, from the skin tattoos and cave walls of prehistory, to temples and palaces, cathedrals and manuscripts, at some point it became desirable, advantageous even, for it to become portable, and transferable. Panels and canvases made art smaller, and pigment bound by egg, oil, or other experimental organic excretions, was invented to be more and more durable.

At some point, thanks to all that had gone before, society reached a level where ordinary people could spend a lifetime perfecting their ability to mix and apply paint, in extraordinary ways. Picasso put it nicely:

There are painters who transform the sun into a yellow spot, but there are others who, thanks to their art and intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.

Now Manifest seeks to present and document the best painting of the most varied types being made in the world today. PAINT is an exhibit that calls for works of painting from around the world, made by students or professionals, as they carry the tradition forward, or reform it for another day.