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Sticks in my Art

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This week I will be presenting a new sculpture called "No Man is an Island" at the Bajo El Sol Gallery on St John. The primary medium is driftwood sticks. Sticks have been a reoccurring theme in my paintings and my sculptures over the years. The opening reception for the "Island is a World" show is Friday evening, January 6th, 2017.

About 15 years ago I began painting in the community parks near my home in Fairfax County, Virginia. At one point I found broken glass in a stream bed which had been tumbled across the rocks and smoothed much like sea glass. I collected it and began to wire in into sculptural shapes incorporating driftwood sticks I collected from my trips to the Chesapeake Bay.

The resulting series was titled Urban Streams. This was the first time I began to use sticks in combination with wire.

"Urban Streams" at the Artomatic Show in Crystal City, Virginia in 2008. You can read a blog post by Tammy Vitale about my show here.

My work with sticks continued in my final year of graduate school where I created still life set ups of sticks which i drew and painted many times. I also received an art grant to build this sculpture called Raven Tree for an regional Festival in Delaware. I worked with sticks and ropes and wire create this piece. It was designed to be burnt one night during the festival.

The following year I created a life-sized horse sculpture as a centerpiece of the same festival.

In 2008, I received another grant to create this piece for the Virgin Festival Music Concert in Baltimore, MD. Once again I was working with sticks, glass, and wire. The feathers on the wings were created by crushing aluminum cans and "sewing" them with wire into place with wire. The sticks were spray painted gold. He currently resides in a backyard in Riverdale, MD.

When I moved to St John, United States Virgin Islands in 2008 I used sticks, wire, and beach glass to create lizard sculptures.

This piece was created in 2010 for an Art's Alive show where the base for all of the artwork was mirrors. the show was titled "Outside the Looking Glass."

I also used sticks to create the panel on the fare left with sticks for my series of Fence Art pieces.

And of course trees, branches, and sticks still figure prominently in my oil paintings. You can see many of these at the Mango Tango Art Gallery. I will be having a solo show there opening March 24th, 2017.


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