Thoughts on Art

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Fragility of Life in Patterns in Flight

Life is fragile.  This tenuous state is particularly evident in the smaller living creatures around us.  When I first decided to use butterflies as my subjects for a painting series, I ordered 12 Painted Lady larvae from a science company.  It was November, and I wanted to have a physical reference to work from as well as to study the life cycle of the subject.  Of the 12 larvae that arrived, 10 survived to enter the cocoon and 8 survived the cocoon and became butterflies.  By the end of the first month, I had around 5 butterflies, 2 of which survived three months.  (Which is ...

Translucent Color in Patterns in Flight

Have you ever walked outside in the fall and looked up at golden leaves that glowed as the sun shone through them?  Has the similarity of these natural foliage and stained glass ever struck you?  Butterflies wings can have the same effect on light when the creatures fly in-between you and the light source.  These natural sources, leaves and wings, do not color the light and create a pattern on the floor, but they do seem to glow, suspended in the sky.

Searching for Beauty in the Ice

An ice storm is something that holds rare beauty.  My first memory of one was the 2003 ice storm when I was in college in Kentucky.  In December ’09, I was with my family during the ice storm that hit Illinois.  On the morning of the storm, I spent several hours with my father, Allen Steely, out in the freezing rain taking pictures of the ice.  We would run out of the car and take a photograph of a tree or a park bench, and return quickly to warm back up. Perhaps ice storms are not so rare, but I still get excited at the prediction. I hope to take advantage of each opportunity to ...

Beauty of Process or Anatomy of a Butterfly

There is something beautiful about the process of forming of ideas, thoughts, and art.  At a gallery or museum one can sometimes see the development of a series by viewing its parts, but this process is still fairly opaque with only a showing of the final work. Thankfully artist blogs are full of studies showing their process.  Below I have a series of images showing a glimpse of my process as I created three of my recent butterfly paintings.

Inspiration in Munich

Speed of Time

I remember more then one science video that I watched as a child having a scene where something that took months to occur would be shown in a minute’s time.  Technology allowed us to see changes that occurred slowly, quickly.  For example, a plant would grow out of the ground, bud, a flower would open up and die all in the same minute.  It was fascinating because it was something that one could not experience in nature. How do my paintings treat speed?  Well, in Foreshadowing, paintings of flowers, time travels faster then the speed of nature.  In Patterns in Flight, butterfly wing p...

Breaking out of the Shell

I am posting three new eggshell paintings in series, Morning Promise.  Although the majority of the painting was done last fall I have recently added the final layers to three new eggshell paintings.  These paintings are similar to the eggshell painting that was posted in November.  They create a mini series where I investigated the beauty of contrived patterns of broken shells.

Escher: Similar Interests

While in The Hague, Netherlands last autumn, I took a few hours to look into the Escher Museum (Escher in het Paleis or Escher in the Palace).  In the past I have not regarded M.C. Escher too highly, consequently I was surprised at how much I enjoyed seeing the work.  I discovered how the following things that fascinated Escher also interest me: cylindrical reflections, patterns, and objects transitioning or changing within an image.

Are We Students of Images?

Images, photographs, visual advertisements, logos, and even “fine art”.  We are bombarded with pieces of visual communication.  In each image, there is a message.  However, there are so many images that we become numb to them.  We soak up the message without either realizing it or taking the time to diagnose the meaning and agree or disagree with it.  It is not possible to individually interact with all of these messages.  Should we sift through and find images that have a more lasting impact?