Today I posted pictures of a the third panel in a set of three that has been brewing for quite a while. When I began my master’s in journalism in 2009, I had been working on large scale mixed media pieces that dealt with different forms of architectural structure, and in the following two years that I was in journalism school I made just about nothing art-wise. When I graduated in 2011 I was bursting with creative ideas from not making anything for so long, and when I moved to Massachusetts that fall this series was one of the first things I began. I opened my old portfolios and found some odds and ends to work with – a long, odd-shaped scrap of stencil board and a pile of 10×20 pieces of BFK with a brick and chain-link pattern on them were among the things I found. I cut a mish-mash of architectural imagery from old source photos into the stencil board, and used up some 6-year-old cans of spray paint spraying the image onto several pieces of the patterned paper. Ironically, I was using the spray paint left over from back in my graffiti days thinking I would be done with the medium forever, but that project gave me the bug that got me making spray paint work for the entire next year. I purposefully arranged and mounted the spray painted papers onto plywood panels, intending to work on top of the random mixture of pattern and spray paint buildings as a background, and other projects took precedence for the next two years leaving the panels to collect dust. What it took to get them finished was another move. When I came to Chicago this year and got set up, I pulled out these panels, determined to finish them. To those who don’t know, this can be a very intimidating undertaking. It’s very hard to pick back up from a point left so long ago. A piece left alone too long loses it’s vitality and inspiration; the chances of wasting your time making a lackluster piece of crap is pretty good in that scenario. But I dwelt on the setup I had created for myself in those panels back then and visualized what they would look like finished, and from those meditations I’ve spent the last two months completing the three newest pieces in my organic bricks series, featuring imagery found from a book of old west ghost towns juxtaposed against imagery meant to reference the present and future of human development. Each piece is 30″x40″, and will be presented in a cradled frame. It is a great feeling to have such a huge project finally finished.
Ghost Town Panel 1 – Matt Kuhlman
Ghost Town panel 2 – Matt Kuhlman
Ghost Town panel 3 – Matt Kuhlman