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Works from the Golden Foundation

Post #1776 • July 5, 2016, 10:10 AM

tl;dr: see the new art.

During the three months I spent overhauling my site last year, I wondered more than once whether the ontology table inspired by RDF triples around which I built the site was Swatting A Fly With An Air-To-Surface Missile level of overkill. My decision at the time was vindicated yesterday when it took a mere afternoon to put all the works I did at the Golden Foundation for the Arts while in residence there at one URL that reads in plain English. In fact some of the related functionality started working immediately after I explained to the program what a group is, and what's in it. It was almost as if it deduced how to respond.

The residency was extraordinary. I learned more about paint in four weeks than in the prior ten years. In addition to allowing us to sample anything that Golden Artist Colors makes (I sought out some Phthalo Blue Red Shade Fluid Acrylic, they had a gallon of it at the ready), they made available their technical staff for generous consultation. As someone who makes his own gouaches, chatting with their paint chemist (a fellow trained as a painter and self-taught as a scientist, my kind of people) for a few hours, mashing up paint-stuff, was consummately edifying.

Among other things, I worked out a method for painting in acrylics that allows for both glazing and a matte finish, resulting in something akin to the effects that I get out of gouache. Before I had been trying to do this by adding water to the paint, which just wasn't cutting it. The new results feel full in a material way that is hard to describe and mostly invisible in reproduction, but in person they bounce light back in a way I find satisfying. I've been thinking about the power of matte surfaces since writing about the Rothko Harvard murals and I'm grateful to clan Golden for helping me come up with my own take on them.

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