Who in this Bowling Alley?
2012
screen print | edition of 10
BUY
$125.00
One of the themes that I brought with me to Monhegan was "A Snowball's Chance in Hell". I came up with this theme rather arbitrarily, getting the idea a while back when I had thought that I might have an opportunity to explore screen printing in depth or trade art for the use of a screen printing facility along with an experienced printer's skills. I liked the feeling and reaction you got when you just said those words...it is kind of humorous and fatalistic at the same time and I sensed that depicting a snowball in hell might be a cool way of exploring using the white of the paper while somehow building up riotous colors around it. Anyway, this print started out as a morning sketch after a night of thunderstorms. I just happened to open up a "B" encyclopedia and came around to "Bowling" and, well it did not turn out exactly as I had preconceived it, but it was essentially a start on the road to hell! P.S. I forgot to even block out the snowball, so I had to use white ink!!!
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Earth and Industry
2012
screen print | edition of 8
BUY
$250.00
18" x 24"
This was one of the first prints I created during my residency. It was based on one of my morning sketches, which in turn was based partly on an image of a vast industrial site that I had come across while mining my 1966 encyclopedia set for an inspirational prompt. My studio was located near Fish Beach on Monhegan and I felt like I was in the heart of the island's "industry sector" of lobster fishing, with stacks of traps lining the way just outside my windows, along with every size and color plastic barrel and tank.
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Evening Sky
2012
screen print | edition of 8
BUY
$250.00
18" x 24"
My evening ritual was to walk up to the Monhegan lighthouse and catch the sunset. I needed a ritual and I needed the exercise! I understand the pleasure in wanting to paint the sky and land...the light is constantly changing and there is a natural compulsion to capture it somehow before it disapears. I was not immune to this, but I would try to "remember" the scene and then try and "see it" again as a print. I think even when you are painting plein air you must enact a version of this as no moment ever looks like the next. But of course I had to add the tires...bold and bouncy just like the clouds!
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Outdoor Enthusiasm
screen print | edition of 13
BUY
$250.00
24" x 18"
This print was created after much frustration trying to create more complex prints with multiple colors. It was a breath of fresh air to just do one color and not have to cut out a paper stencil. As is the case with all of the prints I created while doing my artist's residency on Monhegan Island, Maine, this print was influenced, in part, by my experiences there. In this case it was a curious combination of a previous motif that I had often worked into my imagery; outdoor clothing and gear appropriated from a camping catalog, and seeing a person walk by my studio windows several times, in a high tech wet suit. The clothing motif is a favorite of mine for two reasons: I like the way the clothes are void of humans yet posed as if there are people wearing them and I like how, in this particular catalog I use, they're depicted as drawings with all of the stitches and wrinkles delicately rendered. The rant or content of the text is my own. It is something that I've been thinking about, but have yet to express in any way. This idea of hand drawing text that "expounds" in this way is part of a series of gouaches on paper that I've called Manifestos. Each one begins with a charged word which, despite my disregard for accuracy in building my thesis, I was finding, reflecting upon and speaking about in a way that might hold a certain truth-like quality and that anyone who might read it might experience a variety of feelings from enlightenment to unease to humor to outright incredulity, around otherwise socially charged subjects.
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Rusty's Warning
2012
screen print | edition of 8
BUY
$125.00
14" x 17"
Rusty Spear makes door mats and the like using nylon rope and has it all displayed for sale on his front lawn, just diagonally across from the apartment where I stayed. One day he put out a sign with "Warning" written on it, explaining how people have been lifting his merch and how he would make sure that they knew that he knew and how a police officer would be waiting for them on the other side of the ferry, etc. When I decided to create this print of a bright red gas can, I thought that it had the word warning printed on it, but later some time after completing the print, I walked by and noticed that there was no such word printed in big letters on the can!
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After the Rain
2012
screen print | edition of 11 prints
BUY
$250.00
18" x 24"
The early part of my residency saw some cold rainy days. This print tries to capture the feeling I got after a particularly long stretch ended and blue sky appeared suddenly. It felt like this massive ugly gray cloud was grudgingly lumbering away.
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Low Tide
2012
screen print | edition of 11 prints
BUY
$125.00
14" x 17"
This print was inspired by a trip to Fish Beach where I just began to notice all of the red items that had washed up: red plastic escape vents, cooked lobster carapaces, red rope, red sea weed, bricks and red rusty chains.
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Plein Air Lesson
2012
screen print | edition of 17 prints
BUY
$250.00
24" x 18"
This was another print created as an opportunity to make something that was not too complicated in terms of multiple colors. It turned out to be a little tricky for me just to get the gray registered good around the drone. Here's the inspiration for this image:
One morning I arrived at my studio to find group of plein air painters watching their instructor demonstrate some painting techniques. They were gathered just outside my windows and I found myself checking the scene out from the inside, watching the instructor build his image up and describing his process, while the "students" took copious notes. Everything was fine and dandy...I've enjoyed seeing all of the plein air painters scattered about trying to capture the beauty of Monhegan...until the instructor began to explain how to add some color to their lamp black when making grays. Lamp Black?! You bastard I thought! These are innocent people here that trust you and are hanging on to your every word, couldn't you spend ten frigging minutes to explain to them how to mix their own black?
Later on as I sat back in my apartment eating my lunch I could look down upon an older fellow, one of the students, fumbling with his portable easel rig, arranging his palette, brushes, preliminary sketch...let's see, place the sketch here...shit, too windy...I'll put it back there under my sketch pad, no damn it I can't see it...I'll hold it with my left hand and paint with my right, Christ I need a third arm to hold my view finder! After a while he finally began to paint his picture...holy mother of god! You son of a bitch! He was painting the exact same scene as his instructor!
So there they are hypnotized by the lightning strikes while the drone strikes away, unnoticed, in the distance.
One morning I arrived at my studio to find group of plein air painters watching their instructor demonstrate some painting techniques. They were gathered just outside my windows and I found myself checking the scene out from the inside, watching the instructor build his image up and describing his process, while the "students" took copious notes. Everything was fine and dandy...I've enjoyed seeing all of the plein air painters scattered about trying to capture the beauty of Monhegan...until the instructor began to explain how to add some color to their lamp black when making grays. Lamp Black?! You bastard I thought! These are innocent people here that trust you and are hanging on to your every word, couldn't you spend ten frigging minutes to explain to them how to mix their own black?
Later on as I sat back in my apartment eating my lunch I could look down upon an older fellow, one of the students, fumbling with his portable easel rig, arranging his palette, brushes, preliminary sketch...let's see, place the sketch here...shit, too windy...I'll put it back there under my sketch pad, no damn it I can't see it...I'll hold it with my left hand and paint with my right, Christ I need a third arm to hold my view finder! After a while he finally began to paint his picture...holy mother of god! You son of a bitch! He was painting the exact same scene as his instructor!
So there they are hypnotized by the lightning strikes while the drone strikes away, unnoticed, in the distance.
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Plein Air tripych
2012
screen print | edition of 5 prints
BUY
$750.00
72" x 18"
These three prints essentially can be hung together as a vertical triptych. Notice how the pants are aligned with the four hatted heads and the ladder continues down in to the lowest print. Click on the price above to purchase all three.
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Crow and Gull
2012
screen print | edition of 10
BUY
$250.00
24" x 18"
This print was created using cut paper stencils. It's based on a walk to Fish Beach where I saw a crow and a gull facing opposite directions on the breakwater. It's about contrast and contradictions and probably as mild an image as I'll ever make!
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I Love Bacon (tan)
2012
screen print
BUY
$50.00
17" x 14"
This is a special offering through July 16, 2023. 100% of the proceeds from the discounted sale of this print will go to the Maine Cancer Foundation. My daughter Julie Cole Kenney will be participating in their 2023 Tri for a Cure all-woman's triathalon. Each year, over 1,300 women gather in South Portland to swim, bike & run in Maine Cancer Foundation’s Tri for a Cure - Maine's only all-women's triathlon. Thanks to the efforts of thousands of supporters, the Tri for a Cure has raised more than $20 million for Maine Cancer Foundation, every dollar of which has been reinvested into Maine communities for cancer prevention, early detection, and access to care. Cancer tries, but we TRI harder!
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I Love Bacon (gray)
2012
screen print |
BUY
$50.00
17" x 14"
This is a special offering through July 16, 2023. 100% of the proceeds from the discounted sale of this print will go to the Maine Cancer Foundation. My daughter Julie Cole Kenney will be participating in their 2023 Tri for a Cure all-woman's triathalon. Each year, over 1,300 women gather in South Portland to swim, bike & run in Maine Cancer Foundation’s Tri for a Cure - Maine's only all-women's triathlon. Thanks to the efforts of thousands of supporters, the Tri for a Cure has raised more than $20 million for Maine Cancer Foundation, every dollar of which has been reinvested into Maine communities for cancer prevention, early detection, and access to care. Cancer tries, but we TRI harder!
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I Love Bacon (yellow)
2012
screen print |
BUY
$50.00
17" x 14"
This is a special offering through July 16, 2023. 100% of the proceeds from the discounted sale of this print will go to the Maine Cancer Foundation. My daughter Julie Cole Kenney will be participating in their 2023 Tri for a Cure all-woman's triathalon. Each year, over 1,300 women gather in South Portland to swim, bike & run in Maine Cancer Foundation’s Tri for a Cure - Maine's only all-women's triathlon. Thanks to the efforts of thousands of supporters, the Tri for a Cure has raised more than $20 million for Maine Cancer Foundation, every dollar of which has been reinvested into Maine communities for cancer prevention, early detection, and access to care. Cancer tries, but we TRI harder!
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Prisoner
2012
screen print | edition of 20 prints
BUY
$125.00
14" x 17"
Stay tuned for this print to hopefully expand into multiple vertical triptychness. It's a prisoner enjoying a glass of wine in a cage in a cave, (kind of like a human lobster, enjoying the trap bait but not cooked and dry and orange.) but I'd like to also create more prints of what might exist above the cave, a landscape possibly, and another print above that, sky, heaven, outer space, another planet with another landscape, with another cave...you get the picture? And then, too, what about more prints depicting that which is below him...?
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Winnie's Worry
2012
screen print | edition of 10 prints
BUY
$125.00
17" x 14"
The title of this print is the name written on an old fiberglass rowboat that belonged to the Inn keeper's son where I was staying and was slowly rotting away in the back yard. He told me that he had bought it when he was just a kid and of course it was his mother's "worry" letting her young boy adventure out on the sea. For me this became a metaphor for the struggles of life and the dangers and trials of growing up and navigating one's way through our modern world into adulthood. I noticed, around the equipment strewn yards outside my studio, several makeshift buoy-like contraptions; blue styrofoam all tied up, jury-rigged style, with odd pieces of rope and plywood. They seemed perfect symbols to me, of less than perfect lifestyles, struggling to prosper, survive, stay afloat or even escape within the turbulence of our times.
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Bedazzled
2012
screen print | edition of 16 prints
BUY
$250.00
18" x 24"
I actually saw two minke whales one day while looking out over the sea from the cliffs at Burnt Head! On a separate day I had simply noticed how the sea could sparkle. When I decided to create this print I was itching to make a print that used only black and lots of it! So the shiny black whales were central and it all just came together, the atomic explosion seemed to somehow add a bright (happy?!) if ominous brilliance to an otherwise colorless scene. And the two characters, who do happen to work and/or live on Monhegan and who I saw fairly often, but did not really get a chance to know, felt like two nicely contrasting "types", always with their heads adorned as they are depicted here.
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Walk of Shame
2012
screen print | edition of 10 prints
BUY
$250.00
18" x 24"
The main figure in this print is the Night Heron, which I had seen one evening while contemplating life down at Fish Beach. I did not know what kind of bird it was, but I knew it was not a crow or a gull. Apparently Night Herons grow a couple of loose feathers on the back of their head in the spring, which helped me later identify it. This was one of those kind of important or exciting events that become a little magnified when you are basically alone and have no one to talk to...you notice stuff around you more than usual. I knew that I wanted to depict this event or creature somehow in a print, but I did not feel like it was enough on its own to warrant representation until a bit later when I experienced additional sightings of a different nature and then a scene began to coalesce in my brain. I had woken up very early one morning, around 5 am, the sun had been up for a half hour or so and I was standing at my window gazing out when I noticed a young woman trudging along, doing a poor job trying to keep her oversized sweat pants from dropping to the ground, cigarette in hand, thong clearly visible! After relaying this scene to a local, it was revealed to me that on a small island such as Monhegan, the early risers often witness the “Walk of Shame”!
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1000 Years (red)
2012
screen print | edition of 34
BUY
$125.00
17" x 14"
This image started off as a morning sketch using imagery found in my old encyclopedia set. It's Christopher Columbus and I originally sketched him in outer space, with a space station in the background! As I turned to begin making this into a print, using drawing fluid directly on the screen, I decided to make him under water, copying from another illustration in an encyclopedia, the bubbles rising from a figure in an old fashioned diving suit. I then recalled a conversation with Angela, a lobster woman who came by my open studio and relayed a description of what some scuba diving friends of hers often see on the bottom of the sea around Monhegan...not too pretty! The composition of this screen was now beginning to come together, but my Horror Vacui was kicking in and I needed something in the upper left. A long walk to lobster cove and back allowed me to clear out the cobwebs, thinking about the weight of time and the 1000 year pyramid weight was born!
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Breach (magenta)
2012
screen print | edition of 25 prints
BUY
$250.00
24" x 18"
I drank tap water for the most part while on my 5 week artist's residency on Monhegan Island, Maine. I think that I might have been the only person there who did this! I was never warned against drinking the tap water, but it certainly was not crystal clear...and I think I survived. Meanwhile crates and crates of bottled water could be seen stacked in various places, often too voluminous to make it inside the store or residence where it would be sold or consumed. Something seems wrong about this. Why have we allowed ourselves to get to the point where we no longer trust the water that comes out of the tap? Instead of addressing the problem of groundwater contamination, it seems as though we just buy water and move on. This print began as a sketch of an ocean solid with gallon jugs of water, with a hiking shoe prancing along the surface. I then thought of expanding it into a large print of two figures, depicted as empty outdoor gear of course, and then had the brilliant idea to depict a tuna breaching in the distance. That motif was a newly minted idea that I had gotten after talking with a guy down at Fish Beach who worked for a shipping company that transports large trucks around the Maine islands, usually for construction jobs. He had just seen a tuna breach earlier that day! But it wasn't until I had printed the first screen with the jugs and empty clothing and was preparing to cut out the stencil for the blue water around the jugs that I suddenly realized and saw that I needed also to cut two stencils for the transparent liquid figures, who would then marvel at the sight of the tuna.
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Escape Vent
2012
screen print | edition of 17 prints
BUY
$250.00
18" x 24"
After failing a bit with complex multi-color screen prints, then relaxing with some one-color prints, I decided to try my hand at another complex print! I made a few big boo boos on this one that I probably should not advertise, but am finding that most people don't mind them even after i point them out. For example, the two birds were originally identical, but I forgot to block out the white for the bird on the right, or the left bird's lower wing, when I printed the yellow. So far it's been a unanimous: "I like that"..."Breaks up the symmetry"..."Looks good!" So there is a lesson in the happy accident-prone nature of the medium! In Monhegan the lobster people fish in the winter, so the traps sit stacked all summer and of course birds love to nest in them. These two are bobolinks, discovered in my encyclopedia set, not in real life unfortunately, but I loved the stark, graphic colors and the expressive gesture or pose of the encyclopedia image, so that was a no brainer. As far as the text goes, yes, you guessed it (did you?), it's biblical and I found it the way I usually find biblical verse, I just open the book randomly and start reading. I could not believe it when I shortly stumbled upon this whale and bird combo...particularly since those two elements were already in the print!
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Triumvirate
2012
screen print | edition of 13
BUY
$250.00
18" x 24"
The tourists on Monhegan come as various types. There's the plein air painters, the older women and couples absorbing the rustic charm and the photographers (though just about everyone is a photographer), just to mention a few. But the serious photographers have huge lenses! I was captivated by an evening sky and the crescent moon and at this point was beginning to see everything as a potential screen print! This one involved some tricky (for me!) transparent ink work, but I won't bore you with the details. Let's just say that after working out my beautiful sunset and moon I just had to ruin it and "represent" the cavalcade of monstrous cameras that are a constant sight, when nature starts strutting her stuff.
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