Game
2025. Acrylic and paper on wood panel. 8 x 10 in.

I posted last month about the mash-up that’s happening between my gel-press experiments and some old failed 8×10-inch panels and canvases. Here is the first one out of that mash-up that got my attention. For me it buzzed immediately with the intimation of a new direction.

The 5×7-inch gel prints have the proportions of oversized playing cards. I’m not much of a card-player myself, whether for games or divination, but there’s something about cards themselves that can be compelling to me. Something about the stiff flat uniform shapes carrying arcane symbols and used for transactions with chance. In suits or solitary, whether I understand their meaning or not, and especially in combination, I feel their power. (Interestingly and for what it’s worth, I’m not a gambler. That’s not the attraction.)

When these two colored pieces of insubstantial deli paper hit this uncradled wooden panel painted with a sort of scabrous orange, black, and white, their arrangement immediately spoke to me of a game. The question of what kind of a game was of no interest to me. There was power enough for me in their inscrutable figures and arrangement.

I’ve since completed half a dozen more 8×10-inch collages that have a related dynamic and that I’m thinking of as a collection of “Games”. Some are close to that theme, some stray a little further afield. I’ll be posting more in the future.

I may be about done with these already, though. I’m starting to feel constrained by the 8×10 format and wish I could work bigger, but maintaining the proportional relationship with the gel prints requires this scale. So I may be closing out this direction already. We’ll see.

I’ve worked my intrigue with the power of cards in the past, especially with the Aquaria collection which were also on small-scale uncradled wood panels. But the combination of different figures together on one surface is a whole additional dimension. There’s a lot of accident involved in this process. Appropriate for games of chance.

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