Just found out that a couple of my paintings have been selected to show at the Foundry Art Centre in St. Charles, Mo. next month, in a juried exhibition called Painting.

Painting will be on display from Friday, Oct. 10 through Nov. 21. The show is billed as “a juried exhibition celebrating the art of painting,” where “traditional or experimental styles” are welcome. When I saw the word “experimental” in the call for entries, I knew I had to throw something Foundry’s way. Everything I make is an experiment!

The two paintings I’ll be showing are: The Acid Rain Falls Mainly on the Acid Plain (2007, acrylic on canvas, 20 x 16 in.) and Where Is Gibarian? (2008, acrylic on canvas, 21 x 16 in.). Here they are, freshly framed, in my studio this evening.

Want to know the story behind Where Is Gibarian? As I was painting this piece, I was listening to an audiobook of Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris, a truly mindblowing work of science fiction. (And the Tarkovsky movie is fantastic, too!) When narrator Kris Kelvin enters the space ship Solaris, he’s hoping to meet with a crewmember on board named Gibarian. When Snow, another crewmember, won’t give a straight answer about Gibarian’s whereabouts, Kelvin repeats, “Where’s Gibarian?” Turns out that Gibarian is dead. And the planet they’re orbiting can control the ship’s measurement tools, produce wicked storms and create hallucinated humans. But are they real? You get the idea.

Tags: maximalism, shows

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