Back story: "Expecting Glory"

Hello friends! I am ridiculously excited to have finished a work in progress from 2011 - 2015! The painting is on 2 7' tall x 3' wide slab doors. I purchased the doors raw without hinges, holes, or hardware. They were essentially large artist panels. I began this painting in 2011 in grad school as a stop motion short film. It began as a joke and developed into something more serious.

1st video filmed on this panel.



My professors weren't impressed with the low production value or low artistic quality, but they were very encouraging of doing more to get better. I learned a lot through this project, like setting the camera up on a tripod instead of holding it to snap photos. This video could make someone sea sick! LOL!

Then the next video:



This was shown to my advising panel of professors and still had problems. Problems such as breaking the viewer out of the artwork by including my feet and the sun. Also I still refused to use a tripod so the production value was choppy and inconsistent. Also, it never occurred to me to use a camera setting of a 16:9 ratio (widescreen format) for the video... Lessons learned along the way right?

Video version #3: final version



In this final version, I cut away the highly criticized cartoon-like beginning because it was a narrative that told a story overtly representing life and the passing of time.

“Artists are people driven by the tension between the desire to communicate and the desire to hide.” ― D.W. Winnicott

I wanted to figure out a way to represent the concept of time passing in a more abstract way. So I hung a lightbulb via its power cord and moved it across the picture plane like the rising and setting of the sun. Thus the concept of past, present, and future was born within this work. The past is represented by darkness and the future by the light.

I perceived the work finished at this point and hung the painting, among others, at my thesis show. I played 5 videos via a projection on the back wall of the gallery.

I hung this painting in my first apartment when married to my wife Cara. And two, possibly three, years have passed. We just moved into our first home in April of 2015 and I now have an in home studio. Inspired by the new opportunity to create within my personal studio, I began work rebooting the black and white work into a vibrant painting...