My Paintings from the Lost Forest exhibition this spring at Yumart featured oil paintings with a high level of impasto.  I tried to make full use of a variety of surface qualities and textures as I built up the images over time.

However, there is a painting called Lost Forest from 2011 that has a much different feel, a different language, that used different materials and techniques. Like some of the later paintings, this one is a small diptych, but in character it is much different than the others. I make no apologies for making some paintings that may seem like anomalies within the larger body of my work.

This painting was built in layers over a series of sessions just like the others, and while there are some textural elements betraying some of the history of the image, it was mostly built with layers of acrylic paint thinned with water. In fact I recall painting it with a brush in one hand and a spray bottle in the other. There is no medium or varnish applied on top of the finished painting and it has a surface that is matte but still has some depth about it.

I was reminded of this painting last weekend, foraging for mushrooms in the drizzling rain in a drenched forest at Go Home Lake. Perhaps it was a case of life imitating art. The forms are obscured, dripping. They seem to me to be on the cusp of becoming something else, but what exactly I can’t say.

This painting is an orphan. It’s one of the Lost Forest pieces, but anybody playing “which of these  pictures doesn’t belong” would pick this one from among the others in a flash. I like it because it’s an orphan and because I used different tools and techniques within the same kind of thematic backdrop. I have this one here at 27th Street. I don’t know if it will ever be exhibited – although perhaps one day I’ll do an exhibition of paintings that don’t quite fit in.