Featured Painting

This piece from the "Explorations" series is titled "alien pods." It is an acrylic on canvas, 44"x34." I like the intimate, human scale. Really large paintings have felt off-putting to me recently. I never have felt that the size of the work was a good indicator of the ambition of the work.

I worked on this piece, off and on, from early 1998 to early 1999. There is a lot of working and reworking of the paint which may not be evident in the web image to the right. There is a translucent layered feeling in the way the painting is done.

Usually when I work on a series of paintings it takes me one to two years to complete. There is an intensity in working this way that makes an artist want to go in a different direction for a break. This work was created during one such “break.” Think of it as taking a breather every once in awhile from writing a novel to write a short story. After I had done a number of such individual pieces, I decided to consider it as a series itself and called it “Explorations.” I liked that the paintings held together in their subtext, even if they all looked very different superficially. As the series title "Explorations" suggests I was following ideas that interested me at the moment. The individual images in the "Explorations" series might or might not grow into full blown series but I felt the need to create them. They are true one-of-a-kind images. Solitary meditations. They really were terrific fun to paint. "Alien pods" is meant as an ironic title. The image expresses the mystery and beauty of the natural world. The spectacular forms in nature: the sea life; the plant life in rain forests; nature's variations on the living form are awesome! The morphological miracles of the buzzing, blooming world around us. The color on the web image is a bit more chromatic - stronger in color - than the original painting. Paint has a body and lushness that an illuminated image on a monitor can't convey. As with all my work, the paint quality is very important to me. Life is unfinished, messy and filled with energy. I want the way I handle the paint to reflect that sense of things. -Ira Altschiller, 2000