Tom Bubul .info
tom.bubul@gmail.com, @tombubul. Last modified .
"Thinking about" at The White Page
From Sept 18 thru Oct 26 2018 I was an artist in residence at The White Page, an artist-run gallery in Minneapolis, MN. The program there consists of a six-week residency oriented around producing an exhibition for the gallery.
With a show in mind, I wanted to stick to making straight-up paintings, but with a five week production period as a constraint, thought it would be most fun/workable to see what working way faster, looser, and from a more overtly "drawing" starting point might be like, versus my standard "extended dance remix" style. The resulting six paintings make up the show, which is called "Thinking about". If you're in Minneapolis, come thru before Nov 25 2018.
A modified version of the show's accompanying text is further below. I had an extremely fun time on this trip & making these. :)
All works are oil on canvas, painted between 9/18/2018 and 10/24/2018.
Armored sculpture idea ("Subway panic attack" version), 40"x30".
Dracula painting (Cedar ave "Leave Dracula Alone" version), 72"x48". Contains a sample from "House and Sheep" by Louisa Matthiasdottir and a sample from "Bram Stoker's Dracula" by Frances Ford Coppola.
Picnic's over, gotta put on shoes and go back to work, 40"x30". Shoutout to "Untitled (Blanket Couple)" by Kerry James Marshall though any resemblance in this case was unintentional.
Rolling egg (Cedar ave edit), 36"x48". Contains a sample from "Rolling egg #1 (August 8 2018)" by Jacob Berendes.
Jackolantern says (Toasty dub), 40"x60". Contains samples from "Uncertainty of the Poet" by Giorgio de Chirico.
Dumpling painting ("Family Coin" version), 48"x36"
Not that I don’t love cryptic and totally abstract stuff, but since everyone I know is spending lots of interpretive and emotional energy outside the art realm these days, I’ve been thinking it might be a good moment to turn my personal attention within the art realm to making... straight-up recognizable representational and pictorial paintings? I don’t see this kind of work as being toward providing "an escape from reality" or whatever, but more as a classic reminder that there are other ways to see (or see via) recognizable things, and that hard work and bonkers (even quixotic-seeming) dedication can make interesting or unimaginable things real, or at least space for those kinds of things to become possible later on. I’m interested in artist-run spaces because this premise is also key to the function they provide to their communities, and thru those further to the world. So I pursued the opportunity to be in this artist-run space for the last six weeks or so, and made six paintings for it, of: the end of a picnic, dracula, a pumpkin, a plate of dumplings, a sculpture, and a theater space after hours.
Tactically I think there should be "something for everyone" in here - a bunch of drawing, rendering, and figure styles; a mix of tweaky detail and spacious stuff; and a few approaches to "natural" and "unnatural" (or "real" and "unreal") spaces and forms, with some repeating characters to help guide you through. I enjoy when I can see that an artist cared about working on something, so I tried to put that in there as clearly as I could... and I always like when paintings are a little bit funny, a little bit scary, and keep the eyeball and the mind moving, so on a "results" level, that’s what I’m shooting for here too.
I’ll add that I made the paintings mostly late at night (after my day job, which is full time and remote, and hence how I was able to come out here to do this work), thinking about things like, "the pumpkin energy of walking down the middle of a deserted street before dawn" ... "the sun sets on a Sunday into the critter feeling of work in the morning"... "wind and light moving thru waving leaves"... "crystal sound of a chandelier while walking thru a dark room"... "haunted faces of memory & influence looking in yr window from the night outside"...
Prices on request. :)
Home