Deep in the Hole

Discovery

I was thinking about what direction my imagery might take after leaving Texas for the Illinois prairie. Corn seemed like the obvious point of departure. At the same time I found myself wanting to loosen up and paint cropped nude selfies on flat panels. I even started wondering whether the two belonged together.

That wasn’t the discovery.

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Observation

My paintings have been composed and planned almost completely in Photoshop. By the time I start painting, I’ve already solved every creative problem. The act of painting becomes execution instead of discovery and play. I realized I’d been solving the painting before I ever touched paint.

I’ve been looking for ways to create art that is less precious. Less resolved. Less designed. The obvious thought was that I should try painting looser and faster but having tried that, I began to consider trying to find a way of working that didn’t require making so many irreversible decisions early in the process.

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Old Process

The way I have been working turned into a close ended process of executing a finalized idea:

1. Composing and design in Photoshop
2. Tracing imagery onto precisely measured pickets
3. Cutting the image shapes out
4. Sanding and proming all of the edges
5. Painting details inside the area defined by the cutouts
6. Assembling the cutouts into the final piece I had made digitally

The results were very controled and intentional. The pieces were all very precious and precise, but they rarely surprised me.

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New Process

I was mulling over how I could leave it more open ended if I didn’t trace the images and cut them out, but rather, building them up organically and loosely and playfully before cutting them out.

• Begin with a painted rectangle.
• Let the image emerge.
• Allow mistakes.
• Allow ideas to appear while painting.
• Discover the edge afterward.
• Cut later.
• Assemble later still.

Even the assembly will be open ended as some images will need to be cut or replaced. Images I don’t end up using can be saved and introduced as needed into later pieces.

Key realization:

Move irreversible decisions farther down the process.

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Precision vs. Predetermination

Precision isn’t the enemy. It just doesn’t need to be the default. It can be one technique I used to give emphasis and contrast as beautifully rendered anchor images. Tracing and precision still has a place. Photographic realism still has a place. What changes is when to use them and how to combine them with more expressive and unplanned discoveries.

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Assembly

Even the assembly stage will require me to give up control and compose in response to 1000 happy accidents. Wrangling form on the fly rather than trying to tame it on the computer.

1. Clamp first.
2. Look at it.
3. Rearrange.
4. Remove.
5. Add.
6. Leave it alone.
7. Return later.
8. Commit.

The object should negotiate with me instead of obeying me.

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Unexpected Discovery

The leftovers that are made, the pieces that are edited out during assembly, aren’t to be wasted. I suspect the pieces I remove during assembly shouldn’t be thrown away. They may become an accidental library I can draw from later. Time will tell whether they become useful, but I’d rather discover that in the studio than decide now that they’re scrap.

I want to give future paintings the opportunity to cannibalize pieces of earlier ones, creating a shared history that will tie them together visually and conceptually. A shared DNA. The body of work literally begins feeding itself.

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About the Corn

Corn isn’t the subject. It’s the setting. I’m not interested in becoming “the corn guy.” I’m interested in what the prairie reveals about cultivation, order and the ordinary symbols people build their lives around. Whether corn becomes a recurring image or quietly stays in the background is something I’ll discover by making the work.

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About the Nudes

The economy of nude swapping that exists has made the prototypical, oddly cropped arm extended, high angle selfie a part of pop culture. Some level sexuality helps to create a tension between form and meaning. The interest in this subject lies in the strange visual language of anonymous selfie compositions.

Cropping, awkward angles, deliberate omission of identifiable features. Nude images are created and shared as communication rather than art…which of course I want to appropriate and turn into art through a change of context, but how that will be achieved is still unresolved.

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Bigger Discovery

This wasn’t really a metatation about corn. Or nudes. It was about finding a way to let the work surprise me again.

Keep digging, WOODCOCK 🪏

Pet portraits are always fun. Here are some painting and illustrations I have done to immortalize people’s precious pets. Contact me if you’re interested in me capturing your critter’s likeness for the rest of time or until the acrylic turns to dust.

Keep digging, WOODCOCK 🪏

2022 was wild for me. We came out of the pandemic just in time for me to find myself with a surgically repaired knee, turning 50 and single for the first time since 1985.

I had 6 colonoscopies, 2 stays in the hospital that left me seriously anemic, a vasectomy, a break up, coVid, and almost bought a house in Illinois with a new lady but it didn’t work out.

I also had an art show and created 13 new pieces for it. Among them were three pieces that were a culmination of an idea I had for a while but didn’t know what to do with.

For a few years I knew I wanted to do something with pinup girls posing in, around, and on prickly pear cactuses, but I needed something else, another layer, a special WOODCOCK Lowbrow Pop Art twist. That started to come into view as I considered what the cacti might be growing out of. Containers, cans, cups, buildings and brands that are uniquely San Antonio, to go with the women I was deciding to use for my pinups…also uniquely San Antonio. Especially since I had been going through the San Antonio dating ringer for the previous 6 months.

1. San Antonio women love to fish
2. San Antonio women are spicy
3. San Antonio women have their own agendas
4. San Antonio women can drink

Now, it is important to note that none of these “revelations” are criticisms…except maybe the fishing part. I don’t get that… and although they may be broad generalizations, they reflect my experience with the limited number I encountered across various races and ethnicities…again except the fishing part. I swear they all say they love to fish.

But the result gets my delicate beauties nestled in the hostile embrace of prickly pear pads…a plant that represents so much of the environment and culture. Food, medicine, feed for livestock, beauty all within a rugged plant that can damn near survive anything as long as it’s hot enough. I love all that prickly pear represents about the people, the history and the very climate itself.

Keep digging, WOODCOCK 🪏

I’m not sure how it got there exactly, but this phrase bounced around in my head for 20 years, from sketchbook to sketchbook and eventually into iPhone notes and various electronic lists of ideas. It hung around waiting for me to explore it adequately. I just never seemed to find a way to get it into a visual that I wanted to make. I believe my creativity was inhibited by The Rectangle and the idea of representing “shit” too literally. Eventually my layered, cutouts materialized and I was inspired.

Pigs can’t fly is a reminder for those hoping for the impossible, for the belief in fantasy…or even those who are distracted by the escapism of fantasy.

Wikipedia says:

“When pigs fly” is a way of saying that something will never happen. The phrase is often used for humorous effect, to scoff at over-ambition. Other variations on the phrase include “And pigs will fly,” this one in retort to an outlandish statement.

Shit still stinks: for those who may think that reality can be ignored…needing to be slapped back into reality.

The idea of a pig head flanked by outhouses hit me first. Rather than representing shit literally, I could allude to it with the outhouses and overcome much of what kept me from knowing how to deliver this idea. Then the clouds to tie them together, rounded out with a sun disk behind a bird to represent the aspirations of swinish flight. The flies and severed head on a stick hit me last as the piece came together, hinting at the disturbing themes from the book “Lord of the Flies.”

This is definitely one of the more interesting journeys an idea of mine has taken from conception in the 90s, to execution some 20 years later. Once a couple of things occurred to me, the ball got rolling towards a state of completion I never could have anticipated or hastened. It isn’t a pretty piece and few find any reason to look at it long enough to draw conclusions of their own about what it. And yet, I think it is one of my favorite pieces and represents so much of my growth and change from young adulthood to middle age.

Check it out in the portfolio!

Keep digging, WOODCOCK 🪏

2014 • 17.5″ x 36.5″
acrylic, spray paint on used fence pickets

There was once going to be a “gamer” themed group show at a relatively well known gallery in San Antonio. I was creating this when I found out it was going to be moved to a grungy independent coffee shop/art studio/gallery in an “emerging neighborhood”. I bowed out, not wanting to do group shows in coffee shops at this point in my career.

Still, I was stuck with this piece, a bit of a departure from my usual work. I like it though. Any GenXer like me can relate to the feeling of bruised thumbnails from pounding that old school Nintendo controller too hard, for too long.

This is one of my favorite pieces because it evokes to those who know, a very distinct feeling and memory of our GenX childhood. I sold it for a song to a guy in Houston, who has since married and probably forced by his wife to pitch it.

Keep digging, WOODCOCK 🪏