BACK TO COLLEGE: Round Two & Paintbrush in Hand

Well, I thought as I wandered into Merrill Hall on the campus of the University of Maine at Farmington , I am once again a college boy. Heading down the stairs into the musty basement where the painting classes congregate it was a weird feeling. I did a mental rewind to ten years earlier waiting outside my first art class back at University of Southern Maine probably wondering how many projects the professor would allow me to include Jerry Garcia.  Thinking globally, I know.

Professor Tom Higgins and I had a great chat about my direction this semester in my independent study. We shared our respective recent work and discussed different media and surfaces and solvents and all the various things that people who paint discuss.

The plan for the semester is to paint three large scale (4′x4′) paintings–one for each credit. The first is underway; a mixture of a large flower photograph I took this summer and a landscape. I just received some paint in the mail which will prepare me to kick off the second painting, which will be a triptych of a vast landscape with most of the canvas devoted to the atmospheric part of the landscape (a.k.a. the sky). The third painting I want to create a large combination of unassociated objects with many vanishing points that one can look far into the distance.

All three will feature space and distance as a theme. At least that is what I am writing here before much of the paint has fallen.

Very much in progress, this is the first large scale painting of the semester. It is a floral landscape, which naturally can be shortened to simply a “flandscape”

I have a feeling that this round of college will be quicker, more graceful, and definitely more healthy than the previous round of schooling. Needless to say there will be loud music and late nights–only now the nights will be filled with painting and productivity.
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