Today I’m writing about the last of the periods of my artwork to be featured in the LEROI” Living in Color Exhibition at The Burchfield Penney Art Center, opening this Friday.
Interestingly, the genesis of Flowers and Abstractions is based on advice given to me in the early 1990’s by my friend and internationally renowned artist, Abdias do Nascimento. Quite simply, he told me, “Don’t waste paint.”
Respecting his words of wisdom, whenever I finished painting, I began cleaning my brushes by scraping them onto a blank canvas.
I did it without intention or emphasis on any kind of structure. I would just scrape brushes of all different paint colors until the I felt the canvas was saturated with creativity.
If there was still paint on a brush at that point, I would move to another blank canvas and continue scraping until the brush was paint free.
Over time, this paint scraping technique morphed into my understanding of an artistic process---one of spontaneous creativity where I would go back and choose a canvas and use it as the foundation for a new painting.
In the beginning, I used the scraped paint to create my “Flowers” works of art. Later I was inspired to use them to create abstractions as well.
Eventually, I differentiated between the two forms by scaping paint onto long narrow canvases for the flower paintings and onto smaller, square canvases for the abstractions, as shown in these images.
LEROI: Living in Color Exhibition includes the work of students from Buffalo Center for Arts and Technology (BCAT,) Buffalo Public Schools (BPS,) Just Buffalo Literary Center (JBLC,) and Squeaky Wheel Film & Media Art Center. The exhibition will be on view at the Burchfield Penney Art Center through March 26, 2023, presented by M&T Bank, with additional support from organizations and individuals throughout the Western New York community.