2022-23 Sensuous Shapes & Mimicry
This series began in 2016 with a body of totally nonobjective works containing sensuous shapes with no realist imagery.
During the pandemic I got involved in working with images that I shot on my previous visits to the Bronx Botanical Gardens in New York. Although these works are representational paintings they have slowly moved back towards the abstract in the last six works. Included on this exhibition are three of those more abstract botanical paintings when the ponds at dusk become a network of black abstract shapes.
Earlier this year, with the push and encouragement of my friend, artist and gallery owner, Rebecca Segall, I went back to my abstract works that are now adding graphic bird imagery. I am very interested in the way birds patterns mimic their environments and the beauty and extreme designs of their plumage. The skin cells of birds have a code in their cell shapes that create their feather designs that mimic their environments and helps protect them from their predators.
Having an early classical training at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts keeps my hand and eye focused and an ability to include multiple skills in my work. I now find this union of the imagery and related abstract shapes to be a good subject for me because it feeds my sense of design, as well, as my painterly hand and my love of the natural world. I have painted in oils over the last fifty years and have recently added a limited usage of mirror markers and glitter to illuminate my birds glamour and their florescent dressings.
Throughout my long painting career I have always worked in multiple year-long series that have evolved to and from the real and the ideal.
February, 2023
2018-22 Botanical Gardens of New York
This series of large abstract/realist paintings depicts images from my visits to both the Brooklyn and Bronx Botanical Gardens of New York. This is a new series that shows my last seven paintings completed since November 2018.
Unlike Landscape paintings the subjects of these works are first assembled from selected vectorized computer images to create a personal composition much like a still life set up that I then use as my visual model that is painted by eye.
I am now seeing the beauty of our natural world through the eyes of highly trained Botanists who create Pond and Palm Gardens in the center of a large metropolitan area.
If humans keep destroying their natural environment we may only have these “plant zoos” left to visit.
2013-18 Mystical Realism
This series of large-scale realist paintings depicts the organic greens and natural environments that enhance my life from a local community sponsored agricultural farm to an amazing number of wonderful farm stands throughout the Philadelphia region.
Before they are consumed, I take a photograph of my freshly picked subjects. I,place them on a white ground to dramatize their natural abstract forms and designs in an effort to create a floating or more mystical composition than that of a traditional still life’s perspective. I then bring the image into Photoshop to colorize, move parts around and sometimes combine it with other images. After that I vectorize the jpegs in Illustrator to eliminate their pixels so they can be enlarged as solid vector units of color. With a mix of orange, ochre and raw sienna, I underpaint the entire painting. All the basic proportions, scaling and drawing are done at this stage before the colors are applied because of their large scale.
The subjects become portraits, rather than still lifes, and are made more dramatic by their super size and shadows. The canvases are all scaled up by eye with no projection. This allows my work to be more painterly than their computer sketched models. I also sometimes use multiple views within one canvas to add some magic and bird’s-eye perspectives.
My work is an evolution of ideas, using paint in an on-going visual dialogue, paying homage to our natural world.
Sosson, July 2018