Martin Delabano: Musings of an Artist

I have a show of my recent work on view now at the Kirk Hopper Fine Arts Gallery in Dallas. The show really hangs well together and has a look about it that has a lot to do with everything having a more restrained palette.

Thankfully the gallery didn’t hang all the work I delivered to them.  They beautifully installed my show using 30 of the 38 pieces I delivered to them.  There are always pieces that don’t make the proverbial cut, whether its due to a Gallery Director’s preference or space constraints.

Then there are the pieces not taken to the gallery. These pieces I refer to Stragglers, Oddballs, and Outliers.

Making art has never been a straight path for me. I’m interested in drawing, painting, collage, sculpture and my work has spanned being representational to abstraction. I am often working on a wide variety of pieces at the same time, side by side.  Here is a selection of my Stragglers, Oddballs and Outliers that you will not be seeing in my show.

This piece, “As Luck would have it” is certainly more related to work I was doing before my show at Kirk Hopper back in 2014, which was very reductive abstract paintings. My show of abstract paintings felt like a vacation of sorts from years of heavy collage work and sculpture.

I had found the image of the elephant in a garbage pile and it hung in my classroom for a couple of years.  The image was painted on silk and was very fragile.  One day I found a large tear in it, probably from a thrown pencil or eraser……I do teach middle school after all.  I glued the image down to a stable surface and then started layering it up, on and around the elephant.  It felt odd to be doing this after the abstract paintings.

It might have been the same garbage pile I discovered the elephant, I found this amateur landscape painting.  I turned it on it’s side and it and again started layering up the surface.

Another one from about that same time. Never felt quite finished but hangs in the dinning room at my house.

After my show in 2014 I started some pieces that seemed to be more of a continuation of the abstraction.

 

Then there were paintings that were inspired by a series of collages I had going in the studio in 2018. The hanging hoop and the bulbous forms reappear in paintings that are hanging in my current show.

          

The collages are very small while the paintings are considerably larger.  Again this is work that is being made while I’m working on pieces for my current show.  So here I’m producing all this colorful work while working on this other body of work that has a very restrained palette.

        

Here is another painting from 2018.

Soon I’ll have all these and the other Stragglers, Oddballs, and Outliers uploaded to my website as well as the work from my current show. I hope the show at Kirk Hopper Fine Arts will surprise you after seeing these pieces.

I’m having an artist discussion at the gallery about the work on exhibit September 28 from 2-3 pm.  Hope to see you.

For more information: Kirk Hopper Fine Arts