1977 T-Bird
"1977 T-Bird is a series of twelve sequential encaustic paintings based on stills from a Super 8 film. The film depicts the artist’s enormous 1977 Thunderbird spinning, pointlessly, in the barren landscape of California’s Death Valley. The large powerful 1970’s era automobile in 1977 T-Bird (”The Epitome of Personal Luxury, the Ford Thunderbird reached its pinnacle as a personal luxury car with the 1977 model.”) can be read as a metaphor for contemporary gestural painting. It roars and spins and kicks up a cloud of dust, making some noise and demonstrating its potential, but it goes in circles and makes no progress. The work is nonetheless enthusiastic and sincere, and strives to confirm painting’s relevance in an environment in which discourse has replaced painting as the dominant visual arts medium.” -artist’s statement, 2003
Here, the translation of the random blemishes of the Super 8 film – dust, hair, scratches and other visual noise – is just as important as the car’s gesture and the location, Death Valley, as subject matter. The panels are aggressively painted, resulting in a surface that is rough with drips and textural interference which not only mimics but attempts to manifest a physicality reminiscent of the familiar character of old film. Although I have actually painted some of the hair and scratches from the stills, the random drips and brushwork contribute just as much to bring about this degree of interference that operates as a sort of subtext as much as the fingerprints do in some of the other paintings.
I think that there is always a tension in painting – especially in work that’s informed by gestural modernist painting, like mine – between the image being painted and the way the work is painted, or the marks that make up the painting. It seems that there’s a kind of separation between the actual marks that are made and the picture an artist chooses to paint. And this piece is perhaps more clearly about that (at least for me it is), but this is why I find the Poussin painting interesting and I think this concern is there, to a certain degree, in everything I do.
-from the lecture, ”Specificity”