Reflections on Medieval Pittsburgh

I was going to wait until I had finished a new painting before posting, but didn’t want to lose my thoughts.

I think more people got to see my work because of this show than any of my previous shows. I think hundreds of people came through- maybe 500 people- which is a lot for me considering I’m mostly holed up with my art in my house. I definitely hit a wall talking about myself and my art at some point.

People responded with much more thought and insight than in previous shows. I think one rich part of doing such a high concept show was that it gave people a chance to respond to the themes in narratives, not just the style. I had almost no one talk about the three dimensional quality- everyone wanted to talk about Kings, Krakens, and weird Pittsburgh stuff. This was great- I’m going to remember how cool it was to talk about themes like that and circle back to high concept stuff someday.

With that said, I think the new direction is going to be me painting objects in my house. I have a idea I want to work towards with that, but it’s also just a brute response to the finicky medieval stuff I’ve been puzzling through. I want to do less tiny cuttings and more thick, rich painted objects. I’ve been reading about Cezanne’s still life paintings and I’d like to try to emulate the spirit of them. He made paintings depicting objects with the structure of an abstract painting. He would give different weight to objects because of balance, repeating visual motifs- I want to grab some of that and steal as much of that vibe as I can. The upshot is that I’ll be able to make more paintings more readily.

I would also like an excuse to make more sculptures. We will see if I can find one in the coming years.

Reflections- what was it all about? Did I do what I was trying to do?

I wanted to accomplish a bunch of things at once:

• I wanted to channel my love of history into something high concept and visual
• I wanted to thematically talk about bizarre holdover elements from the medieval world and show how those categories are still active
• I wanted to have show consonance and dissonance withing the show between our culture and medieval Europe
• I wanted to change my style to emulate Froissart’s chronicles

There’s a bunch of stuff that worked- I accomplished a lot of the stuff on the list. I think in terms of execution, Greed hit way harder than I expected it to. It was the only one that used modern painting style to explore medieval themes instead of a medieval painting style to explore modern themes. (I guess there was also a lot of medieval style/medieval themes too). I wish I had done that a little more.

The scale of each painting was also pretty epic in terms of time taken/what was produced. I had originally wanted to make a number of really small paintings that culminated in a sort of emerging medieval Pittsburgh thought. That was the original thought with the baseball player and peasant. I lost confidence in that idea after receiving some criticism, but in retrospect I should have stuck to my guns. It was hard for people to buy the paintings, and a lot of people wanted to. If I had had more mid range stuff it would have let me get more people a piece of Medieval Pittsburgh. I really want people to have the paintings; that butts up against my other desire which is to make intense, uncompromising work.

Overall, really successful show. Excited to move forward, but I imagine I’ll circle back to this at some point- there’s a lot there and I would hate to permanently close the book on this concept. Grocery Knight might have to ride again in the coming years.