It’s my great pleasure to announce that six of my Absolute paintings will be on display at the Schumacher Gallery as part of their Elements Exhibition. National circulation has recently kept my Absolute paintings from my home state of Ohio. It will be nice to show them to a home crowd again. This exhibition features a pool of talented artists and can be seen among a private collection that contains a wonderfully large number of international heavy-hitters in the art world.
Exhibition Dates:
January 18 – March 23
Meet-the-Artists Opening Reception:
Friday, January 22, 5:00 – 7:30 p.m.
“Absolute: Earnest”, Oil paint on reclaimed oak. 10 7/8″ x 1- 1/4”. 11.11.15
Depending on whether or not you follow my art, you may know that I use reclaimed materials in almost every body of artwork I make. If you’re new to my work you can see many examples of this here. Several of my recent artworks have been painted on planks of 100+ yr old reclaimed barn shelving. During its former life, one side of the shelving was protected from the elements with a thick grayish-white paint. The other side was left a rich wood grain that darkened over time from the barn atmosphere. To clean away some of the residue that may have collected over the years, I had to sand down both sides of the wood. Each time I cleaned off the surface residue on the backside, I wondered how I’d use this aged surface in the final piece. Absolute: Earnest is the result.
The occasional conversational sidebar can prove to be a helpful way to add extra depth to a particular idea without stepping aside completely. As the Absolute series has grown, there has been several micro-series within the larger set. Absolute: Contrive and its sister painting Absolute: Construct are such examples. Both pieces(photos below) are the same size and expand upon similarly themed content. Read on for more information.
Absolute: Contrive, oil on refinished red oak. 22″ x 26″. 11.2.15
The Story Behind The Original “Absolute” Painting & Updated Images
by Daric Gill
Absolute Orchid (Orchid’s Empty). Oil on wood panel. 11″ x 17 1/4″. 2008
We all love when a great idea travels along a bolt of lightning and blazes right into our skulls. But there’s also something really satisfying about a slow rolling brainstorm that overtime builds into something great. These kinds of ideas seem as if they need time to simmer down to a distilled form; extracting, refining, and aging to something far more potent. The latter of the two was the case for the origins of the Absolute paintings.
It so happens that the first in the Absolute series is also the last piece in a deconstructed triptych. The previous triptych actually starts as a portrait painting and ends in a still life. Originally titled Orchid’s Empty, this painting sat as an unknown transition piece for a few years.
In fact, I stopped making still lives altogether after undergraduate school. The brutal truth is that trompe l’oeil paintings (a painting style used to deceive the eye) is often a study about the ‘objectness’ of the still life rather than the pursuit of a complex concept. I realized I didn’t have any place for that limitation and I stuck to sculpture and portrait paintings until I had something more meaty to hold onto. Graduate school came and went as with my stint as a teacher, and I still felt a little disenchanted.
For a while, I almost gave up painting altogether…
Daric Gill 
You must be logged in to post a comment.