ANTI-GRAVITY - MULTIPLE WAY ARTWORKS

     With the Anti Gravity Paintings, I often make them so they are balanced and can be hung in multiple ways.  I do this for several reasons.  First, it is artistically challenging.  Second, it’s a way to get two or more paintings from one work, a good bang for your buck.  The artwork then avoids ever becoming stagnant and has an organic life force quality, like nature.  Maybe that is why I was also unconsciously drawn to make my early kinetic works. 

     People often try to capture nature and it’s awesome grander and forces but end up showing it stagnant or still and miss the boat in trying to capture or show it.  That is why I love the flowers I paint being blown about by the wind.  Probably the most amusing of why I do these Anti-Gravity paintings,  is that I laugh when people sometimes hang an abstract painting of mine the wrong way.  Couldn’t they clearly see that the painting was balanced in a certain way?  That’s modern art, I think - many people really don’t get it but the artist, and not always a young artist at that.

     A fourth reason for playing with the idea of rotating an artwork in it’s making and viewing can be to straddle the worlds/languages of abstraction and realism.  Just recently looking back in an old notebook of mine from the late 1970’s, I was so surprised to find I had two drawings tucked in there.  I’d begun exploring this concept  of  anti-gravity work as far back as then.  Some of my first such explorations were some drawings done in an apartment I shared with a good friend on Waverly Place in New York CIty.

     By deliberately making these works balanced in multiply ways, I avoid anyone potentially hanging these works the so called, wrong way.  The works become dynamically versatile and immune to being “Wrong”.  I guess these artworks have a certain “Freedom” which is at the fundamental core of the artist nature (and or should be).  As a contemporary artist, it appears to be part of my role I have taken on to continually break down the notion of tradition (in the confines and arena of tradition) of what is supposed to be.  Jackson Pollock and Pablo Picasso immediately come to mind as  two major champs in that department.  They entered the art world with dynamite and busted the doors of painting wide open.  Duchamp busted the doors of art wide open as to even what is art with his famous urinal signed R.Mutt.

     For me at least, these paintings also have another layer of concept. And that is that I think of these two panel paintings like a human couple.  When they come together, they work as one painting, yet apart they are also each independent and successful on their own as two separate paintings.  My notion of a healthy couple.

     Below are two canvases from the “Tutto Qui “Series shown in numerous ways together and apart.