Stenciled Series

STENCIL PAINTINGS

2019 to present

The stencil paintings began as an outgrowth of a project I did in 2015 for Art Basel on the side of a warehouse in the Wynwood Arts District of Miami. The entire 80 feet of the façade was covered in assorted stencils and painted. The project only lasted a few weeks as the building was sold and renovated in the quickly gentrified area but I became fascinated by the process. For the original stencils in that project, I used a halftone process within Photoshop to modify the individual images that were then cut on a laser engraver/cutter to create the stencils.

I realized that although this did yield a readable image, it was unsatisfactory, as it did not yield a full range of values. Certainly the value range is not a characteristic that is generally considered when making stencils. More typically they are designed to quickly communicate a picture and be used over and over again. For me as an artist, any technique should be pushed and prodded. As I began playing with different ways to make stencils using a pixel grid as a base structure, I eventually designed a software program that broke down images with a continuous value range allowing me to create a truly photographic stencil. By keeping the stencils tied to the grid, I can easily play with the scale of the final work that allows me the flexibility in determining the ideal scale for the image I am working with.

My first images I created using this process were pictures of the moon that I have shot regularly for years with a 600 mm lens. Seeped in superstition and intrigue, the moon is a fascinating subject; we all see the exact same thing and yet it means something completely different to each of us. It fosters events and marks time. As a subject, it is the perfect antidote for the digital age and yet it is also ubiquitous as people around the world post their pictures of it on social media. For this series, I decided that each moon painting would be based on a different moon photograph and each photograph – like each stencil – would only be used once.

With these works, I am not trying to hide the fact that these are composite stencils – some show the alignment difficulties of the component pieces, I have always enjoyed taking art making processes and pushing the technical limits or pictorial possibilities, however I still believe that the difficulties in a process and the errors show through as they offer clues about the making. Ironically, the detail of the stencils makes them inherently fragile and so they can only be used once making each piece unique from those stencils and imbibing originality in each piece as the process and its inherent instability influences the final image.

As I continue to develop this series, I have experimented with different images that enjoy the larger scale including the Lion and various landscapes. Although some of these do draw on the work of various artists including the large pastels of Robert Longo, there is both immediacy to the process and a lineage in digital art, street art and crafting that I believe makes them inherently different.