Sedimentary - Rock Quarry (2012)

So have the fence pickets, low end lowbrow stuff run its course? Or am I just painting the wrong things on it? I think I’m too tight on a surface that is too unforgiving. Am I getting ready to leave Texas for Illinois and need to switch to something more vertical (Chicago) and horizontal (prairie)?

I’m thinking layers as parts of a personality and personal history in a tall, vertical form at that resembles the human form with a slightly off center square on top for the head. Could work in expressive hands on the body and partially obscured face in the square.

This is how I could do portraits of cops who shot innocent people. Lot so fabric layers depicting white privilege and American idealism and mythological righteousness.

I could be how I paint looser and allow the ground to be incorporated into the imagery and rework the surface and generally beat the hell out of things.

The pickets can be used to make frames and ornamentation and overlays and cutout embellishments like I use now. I could use new woodworking tools to assemble rustic frames and a Dremel to carve elements.

I can bring the rectangle back and then break from it through addition rather than subtraction. The enclosed painted layered rich surface is the sacred, isolated, precious otherness. The magical realm separated from the rest of reality.

Trivial Pursuits (1999)

This same type of thing can be done with relief prints as well. different pieces cut and inked and assembled on a page one at a time.

Posted by WOODCOCK

After a long exile in South Texas climbing out of a nihilistic funk, Otis Woodcock has found his way back to the open skies and quiet horizons of the American prairie. Having earned an MFA from Miami University, Ohio, he left his ancestral home in southern Indiana, spending the last three decades between Louisville, Kentucky, and San Antonio, Texas, developing his Iconoclasmatic Pop Art™ practice. On this journey, an anxious recovering Catholic and cancer survivor gradually evolved into the optimistic existentialist whose work is less interested in providing answers than in questioning certainty. Today, Woodcock lives and works where the seasonal rhythms and expansive landscapes of the Midwest serve as the backdrop for an ongoing exploration of belief systems, cultural inheritance, and the subtle poetry of ordinary things.