Exhibition in Tennessee

I'm currently exhibiting at the Troy Plunk Gallery at Freed-Hardeman University. Eggs, Milk, Silver, Graphite runs March 10 through April 11, 2011. For more information, go to www.fhu.edu/art or call 731.989.6079.

As Above, So Below installation views, part 2

More views, second gallery.

As Above, So Below installation views

Here are a few installation shots of As Above, So Below, recent egg temperas, etchings, silverpoint drawings, photographs, video by collaborating couple Suzanne Scherer and Pavel Ouporov. On view at the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art at Auburn University.

Roger Brown

I’m very happy to report these new acquisitions for my museum, the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art: two paintings by the late Roger Brown (1941–1997), a native Alabamian who made it big as a Chicago Imagist.

Hank Williams, Honky Tonk Man, 1990, oil on canvas, 72 x 72 inches

Mothra at Inner Circle Drive, 1988, oil on canvas, 48 x 72 inches

As Above, So Below: Recent Work by Scherer & Ouporov

My next project at the museum is a solo show of Scherer & Ouporov, a Russian-American collaborating couple who live in Florida. Opening August 28, As Above, So Below includes egg tempera paintings, silverpoint drawings, etchings, photographs and video and will be accompanied by a fully illustrated hard-cover catalogue. See examples of their art at their website and coming soon to the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art website.

(Photo: Language of the Birds, 2009, egg tempera, gemstones and 24-carat gold on wood panel, 24 x 18 inches, collection of Dr. Rick Daigle, courtesy ACA Galleries, New York)

Landscape with Stump

My friend Greg Benson thinks the only good painter is a landscape painter. In an effort to stay on his good side, I painted this little landscape for my current show at Wesleyan College.

Landscape with Stump, 2009, egg tempera over casein on hardboard panel, 9 x 9 inches.

Olsen's Palette (work in progress, 12)

12.

I suppose this is done. Returning to the painting after a long interval was interesting. Many of the choices I'd made previously, and thought were good, now bugged the crap out me. No really drastic changes took place on this last round of work, however. I continued to bring up the values of the tubes in the foreground using a pale body color on the near tubes. Almost pure white. I killed the background's high contrasts, panel top and bottom. Those bands were way too distracting. And I tried to consolidate the masses of the tubes and tabletop beneath them. Overall, I shifted the painting's hues farther away from brown. The scanner is acting up, but I'll upload some detail images later, captured by camera.

Olsen's Palette (work in progress, 11)

11.

Hmmm. Here's a post I never uploaded, an image of a work in progress some time ago. An upcoming exhibition gave me the prompt to resolve the thing. Next image shows its current, and likely finished, state.

Upcoming exhibition in Macon

Long overdue attention to Blogger...
Here are a few images of recent paintings in tempera for a solo show at Wesleyan College in Macon, GA next month.

Scott Belville in His Studio

(detail)

Jay Bolotin in His Studio

(detail)

(detail)

Dennis Harper, Paintings in Egg Tempera
March 18 – April 29, 2009
Opening reception: March 18, 2009, 6-7:30PM with gallery talk by the artist at 6:45PM.
Wesleyan College, Murphey Gallery
Valeria McCullough Murphey Art Building
4760 Forsyth Road, Macon, GA 31210
Gallery Hours: M-F, 10-12 PM & 12:30-5 PM

High Fauxdelity, 3

(Here's an article that appeared in the Athens Banner-Herald, 11/15/07, with one minor correction*)

Pun-tastic fun with album art

By Julie Phillips | julie.phillips@onlineathens.com | Story updated at 10:59 PM on Wednesday, November 14, 2007

For all the great album art out there, there's an equal number of albums that, well, aren't so good.
Play the game of bad band names and you've got a conversation to last for hours.
Dennis Harper's been taking note of such pictures of in-excellence for years, storing up puns and casting a curious eye on creepy, weird album covers.
And so it came to be that "High Fauxdelity" emerged, a collection of paintings rendered by Harper, who's certain they wouldn't do much to sell the supposed records they hold.
Harper, who by day is curator of exhibitions at the Georgia Museum of Art, and fellow artist Jeffrey Whittle, an instructor at the University of Georgia's Lamar Dodd School of Art, combined their efforts - Whittle's collection titled "12 Inch Love Songs" - for a show currently on display at Flicker.
While Whittle doesn't veer far from his lovely, if offbeat style, Harper takes a break from his more serious (though not without humor) egg tempera works for his acrylic "albums."
"It's been a nice [antidote to my tempera work]*," he says, adding the size of the images in the show aren't CD-size, but "the size of 12-inch LP's - I miss that more broad expanse of graphic design - so there's a little nostalgia for that."
Probably the best part about Harper's works are the pun-tastic album titles for records you'd be pretty scared to listen to - "Sexy Organ," "Moody Waters" and "Modern Vibes for Groovy Chicks and Guys," for instance.
"There's plenty of bad album art out there, and people love it," Harper says, admitting to a love-hate relationship with bad album art himself - though the love part comes in no small part from the ideas it inspires.
"I carry around a little notebook for ideas," Harper says. "You know, bad ideas are like bad songs - they pop into your head and you can't get them out."

'High Fauxdelity' by Dennis Harper and '12-Inch Love Songs' by Jeffrey Whittle
Paintings inspired by album art
When: Through Nov. 30; reception 6-8 p.m. today
Where: Flicker Theatre and Bar, 263 W. Washington St.
Call: (706) 546-0039

Published in the Athens Banner-Herald on 11/15/07

Click here to return to story:
http://www.onlineathens.com/stories/111507/marquee_20071115017.shtml

High Fauxdelity, 2

After a sad but almost certain cancellation of our show, due to Flicker's closure, Jeffrey Whittle and I are again back in the loop, installing High Faudelity / 12-Inch Love Songs this week thanks to Flicker's sale and re-opening. The show will be open to the public after happy hour Tuesday, November 6, with a reception Thursday, November 15. Come on by sometime that evening.

I don't have any of Whittle's pictures to post, but here are four more of my fake album covers included in the exhibition. (Each 12.5 x 12.5 inches, acrylic on MDF.)

Susan, Thrice (Yoko Godai)

Here is another painting going to Manipulating the Commonplace at Swan Coach House Gallery.

Susan, Thrice (Yoko Godai), 2007, egg tempera and silverpoint over casein on panel, 24 x 31 inches.

Detail

Untitled (Encounter in a Foyer)

Not too many new postings here recently, eh? I've been busy with several projects, one of which is working on new paintings for a show at the Swan Coach House Gallery, in Atlanta. Manipulating the Commonplace: Nine Southern Artists Reinterpret Realism opens August 9 and runs through September 22.


Here are a few views of one of the new paintings. Untitled (Encounter in a Foyer), 2007, egg tempera, gold leaf, and silverpoint over casein on panel, 16 x 20 inches.

High Fauxdelity, 1

Olsen's Palette has sat untouched in the studio for some several weeks while I have concentrated on more pressing projects. For those one or two faithful visitors to this blog who are interested in seeing its progress, my apologies for the hiatus. In its stead, I'm painting a portrait commission, new works for a show in Atlanta in August, and the exterior of my house (plein air painting?) Also, I'm preparing for a two-person exhibition in Athens with Jeffrey Whittle, showing this November at Flicker. My works for the show are a group of fake album covers, called High Fauxdelity; Jeffrey's print series is called 12-inch Love Songs. Look for more info on our twin-bill in later blog posts.
Meanwhile, here are the first three "LPs." Each is acrylic on hardboard panel, 12.5 x 12.5 inches. (Bigger than Whittle's.)

Olsen's Palette (work in progress, 10)

10

At long last I've come back to this painting. As a couple of months have passed since last working on it, I felt I needed to prep the surface to receive new paint. To do that, I first brushed the painting lightly to remove any dust (or, as necessary in my house, dog hairs), then painted a couple of layers of dilute unpigmented egg wash across the whole panel. This seems to help new layers of paint take more readily to the already curing paint film. Yolk to water proportion is probably about 1:5, or slightly thinner. The painting still doesn't have the kind of resolution of forms nor the color/value contrasts that I'm looking for in the finished work, so I've started to strengthen all the shadows and edges; first with a greenish-umber pigment, then ivory black. I think I'll likely do something as well to the negative space below and beyond the table to place the palette and table more firmly in space, and in the context of Olsen's studio. Probably, I'll show a glimpse of one of his paintings in the background.

Olsen's Palette (work in progress, 9)

9

I will have to delay my work on the painting for a short while. I want to use the panel-- in its present, unfinished state -- in an exhibition (and tempera painting demonstration) at Gainesville State College, Georgia. This current photo reflects continued progress to refine the local colors of the tubes and other objects as they gradually evolve from the monochrome underpainting that defined basic volumes and space. When I resume work on the panel, I'll articulate further distinctions of the objects in the pile, and move from washes and glazes into more linear brushwork and hatching.
See you in about a month...

Olsen's Palette (work in progress, 8)

8

Unfortunately, not a lot of time to paint today, but I decided to use my limited time in the studio to begin giving the tubes their "indigenous" colors. Some of the tubes are old and grubby, mingling all the colors from Ole's handling of them and transmogrifying into a kind of mongrel brown. I'll get to that as a last touch, though.

Olsen's Palette (work in progress, 7)

7

Still working to bring depth and volume to the rendering, I alternate between adding light and dark washes. The red underpainting peeks through a little more strongly than I'll want in the end, but you can see how it imbues a warm glow to the cooler grays and browns that will predominate the colors in the finished painting.

Olsen's Palette (work in progress, 6)

6

I used tints of ivory black and zinc white to begin giving color to the metal tubes of oil paint and to cool the shadows they cast on the work table. The same color is in the floor and wall beyond the table. A little green earth is washed over the round glass palette, and I'm using a greenish raw umber to continue modeling the details in the big pile.

Detail

Olsen's Palette (work in progress, 5)

5

I've started applying egg tempera washes over the casein underpainting. First, however, I sized the casein work with a couple of layers of dilute egg yolk wash, unpigmented. Next, I laid down a loose glaze of raw sienna (a golden brown variety). I then modeled some of the middle values in darker but still transparent raw sienna and verdaccio giallo. Finally, I reinforced the lighter values with buff titanium (a light tan-hued white pigment.) I'll bring up the lights a little more strongly and start applying washes of grays, blues, and greens over the composition. I'll push toward more natural colors yet try to keep the treatment a little soft-edged, brushy, and transparent at this early stage.

Olsen's Palette (work in progress, 4)

4

The painting after more modeling in Venetian red, ivory black, and titanium white washes.

Olsen's Palette (work in progress, 3)

3

I'm starting to shape the tubes of paint in the picture with reinforcing washes of ivory black and Venetian red, still in casein. I want to bring out their overlapping crumpled forms, of course, but also try to impart a sense of spatial recession by varying the value contrasts from front of table to back. I'll take this stage of the process a good bit farther, remaining essentially monochromatic, as I resolve the underpainting before moving on to naturalistic colors.

Detail

Olsen's Palette (work in progress, 2)

2

I finished working over all the chalk transfer with diluted black casein. I really just wanted to establish the contours of this jumble of forms. Later, I'll model the range of lights and darks. On top of my linear outline I washed a couple of passes of Venetian red casein.

Olsen's Palette (work in progress, 1)

1

This is a "still life" from a corner of Richard Olsen's studio: the painter's work table and palette. My panel is a commercially prepared support, rabbitskin-glue gesso on Duron Masonite. It was made by an Athens, GA based company, Realgesso, and given to me by them to try out. (Thanks, Howard!) It's a small one, 8 x 10 inches. This first photo shows the initial processes in my painting technique. The faint red outlines are red chalk transfers from my drawing study. On top of that are contours in black casein wash that strengthen the chalk lines.