I’ve been working for a while on a new series titled Pentimento, which you can see in more detail here.  Almost as soon as I started these pieces they were destined for a two-artist exhibition with my good friend (and amazing artist!) Susana Arias,   It’s not too late to see this exhibition, which is up until August 19, at Curated by the Sea Gallery in downtown Santa Cruz.  If you can’t get there, here are some photos from the show, but of course it’s always even better seen in person.  I feel that our work plays well together and am just thrilled with the exhibition. 

Here’s what I wrote for the exhibition about the Pentimenti series:

Pentimento refers to visible traces of earlier paintings underneath a final painting. Sometimes these earlier layers are visible because the top paint has become more transparent over time. Sometimes earlier layers are seen with x-rays or other imaging. But always it refers to a part of the painting that the artist later covered up. With this series, I exposed the earlier layers myself, and had some surprises along the way. I don’t always remember every stage of a painting, and I often paint over completed paintings with something completely different. Seeing the choices I had previously made has me thinking about the sorts of choices I now make with my work. But there’s also an analogy to other sorts of histories in my life: people who have come and gone, things I’ve done that are now in my past, those loved ones who I miss every day. An alternate title for this series was Requiem, and they are, in a way, requiems to some sort of past.