Painting Dad's Portrait

Two years ago I started a painting of my father. I am very much an amateur at painting but of all the types of artistic expression I have tried, I find painting with oil pigments to be an unique type of intellectual and creative process. Painting with oil is as much about the process as the final output, one that cannot be done in a short time but must be a process of adjustment and inspiration over time and space.

I started penciling a scene where my father is working at his table saw through a set of glass doors at a house my father used to rent in Grand Junction. When I started the painting, I didn't have the time or the place to work on this, so after applying one color for curtains, I had put away this painting until this weekend.

On Saturday, I started painting and I quickly realized that I was out of white paint. I still continued to work on the piece and after I finished up for the day. The first picture is a result of this day of painting. You can see the couch in the foreground painted yellow. When I have white again, I'll be bleaching out the yellow to more of a tan color. You can see my father pushing a yellow two-by-four through the table saw. While I was working on this painting, I realized that this scene will not be factually accurate but is a recollection of a specific time and place (early 2006 in Grand Junction, Colorado). Another context for me is that my father has always worked with wood, building bookshelves, cabinets, and other small wood-working projects all of my life and this painting is also capturing an important facet of my own father.

On Sunday, I continued to work on this painting. With the long lead time for oil paint to dry, this painting breathes the environment of the cabin. While painting, I considered how information about this and other physical objects begin to create an presence online. This blog entry is the first about this painting but going forward, I could easily imagine having a dedicated web server attached to the painting itself, maybe integrated into the physical frame. The web server could just be as simple as an RFID chip along with a couple of sensors such as humidity and temperature. The server could publish a small subset of information about the physical state of the painting long after it is finished. It could also have a dedicated IPv6 address that would not change and could be tied to RFID. This painting would become a "spime", publishing information about itself and providing a base identifier to organize other information related to itself. This intersection between physical object and its new intrusion into an information-rich ecology is an area I would like to further explore in my own art.

Here is a second photo I took of the painting on Sunday. You can see that the floor is now a darker brunt brown color. The actual carpet was much lighter but I like how the carpet color and the back fence behind my father provide another frame for the painting. I am working with two different light sources. Inside, a light source comes from the lower right, more of floor lamp. Outside, the light source is from the upper left, with the shadows cast from my father down onto the table saw.