How Abandoning My Comfort Zone Creates Serendipity
I’ve just finished the latest installment of my ‘New York City’ Collection, a series of works whose genesis is a testament to the serendipitous nature of what the unknown usually turns out to be when I exit the shell of my comfort zone. A couple years ago, I decided to take a chance and lug my art, along with a collapsible display grid and folding table, driving about an hour to set up shop next to vendors lining thew sidewalk of Prince Street off Broadway in Manhattan. Having no real idea what I was doing those first few weeks, I befriended the artist whose stand was right at the corner ion Broadway, near a subway stairwell, automatically visible to pedestrians ascending and descending. As we got to know each other, he gave me a piece of advice which provided me with the first real inkling as to how to sell my art. I had noticed that people who stopped at my stand tended to gravitate to one style of painting in particular.
In the Language of Nature series, I am able to relax from the relatively demanding brushwork needed to create more representational work or certain types of abstraction still reliant on light and shading. A brush loaded with watery pigment is placed against paper, the water subject to the same gravitational laws governing all water, changing the direction of its flow as I remove the brush and turn the paper ninety degrees or upside down. Once dried, I meticulously outline every nuanced edge of form . The black ink outline gives it the simultaneous feel of being organic formed by the language of nature, perhaps an amoeba, a continent, or anything in between: cracks in a sidewalk, the crevices in a eroded rock, branches of a tree, a bolt of lightning, or a wandering stream. More watery pigment is applied , dried and gets outlined. Again. And again.
Following my friend/mentor’s advice, I started fashioning the stand exclusively showcasing the ‘Language of Nature’ series, complete with a table cloth which had been a white sheet of fabric before becoming a giant ‘Language of Nature’ painting as a means of marrying all the visual elements of the stand together. My friend had a brilliant idea which would solidify my stand’s visual brand as a New York City staple: that I use the ‘Language of Nature’ to create iconic New York City landmarks. At first, I was unsure how objectively recognizable images would look in a technique so reliant on nature and the spontaneity of water, but was pleasantly surprised. With the intersection of lines containing organic masses of dried pigment acting as individual brushstrokes, one can almost hear the omnipresent hum of urban life, as in the first piece I made of the series, City Vibes. I created a succession of New York City pieces such as Grand Central, Subway Station under City Hall, One World Trade Center, and the latest addition, The Flatiron Building.
I have also started a series of landscapes in the Language of Nature style, such as Poppy Field and Lighthouse and plan to continue the series, expanding past mere land or cityscapes into new dialogues of art.
