Work in Progress
July and August, 2011
Highwire artists exhibit the process of creating their work…in the studio and in the gallery. Lydia Hamilton Brown and Ted Mosher have paintings under development at the gallery.
Photos of Ted Mosher and Lydia Hamilton Brown installations
Notes on Ted Mosher’s Work in Progress: ‘Take a Look at These Hands’
The working title of this painting is ‘Take a Look at These Hands’ – which is a line from an old Talking heads song, and also seems to fit the source material. I saw Pedro Orronte’s ’Ecce Homo’ in the Wallace Collection last year – a dark painting hung in a corner – and spent some time drawing it. I knew that I wanted to use it as the scaffolding for a painting.
David Byrne sang that these hands were those of a government man – which, in the Orrente, would be Pilate, right? However, I am not interested in trying to pin the imagery to the story, would rather try to disassociate it. My attachment to the Orrente painting is through the rhythm of the composition, and the (slightly murky) recessive space. The big issue with using this as source material has been the adjustment from the horizontal to a more nearly square composition.
I think that the painting is about 3/4 complete now; I would like to not over-finish it, if possible. The shapes and boundaries keep adjusting themselves, though, and the Orrente work has established a sort of zone or strata of influence that keeps surfacing to disrupt the process. So, we’ll see what happens.