"Ian and the Empty Chair"
Oil, 28" x 30"
This painting will be featured in the Ninth Annual National Figurative Drawing and Painting Competition and Exhibition at the Lore Degenstein Gallery of Susquehanna University in Selinsgrove, PA. It is a great honor to be in this show and I'm doubly grateful to have this particular piece accepted into it.
In purely technical terms, this painting inspired me to layer paint and glaze and scumble, working warm and cool colors into the background using a fairly limited color palette and value range. I really enjoyed introducing elements of abstraction, mark-making and paint textures into a realistic narrative framework.
I had started working on this painting with another concept in mind, but, as often happens when I have a visual scheme, the work at some point seemed to say another thing altogether, a more melancholy theme. It now seems to me that this painting is about loss. The empty chair used to be occupied by someone you used to be close to and who treasured you, who you thought would be there forever and who is gone.
The young man is waiting patiently and doesn't yet realize that the person will never return.
The Lore Degenstein Figurative show is juried by the internationally acclaimed contemporary realist painter Alia El-Bermani. The show opens on October 28th with the awards ceremony at 7:00pm. The exhibition runs until December 10th, 2017. For more information, click here.
