Priest Painting Stage 2

Byloos Judas Priest Painting 02

This is the second Judas Priest Series painting, although the two (and a third painting in the same series) are going on concurrently. Black with pink and green; it can’t be seen so well now, and maybe I’ll use it again as the painting develops, but there is a very large white pencil on black background drawing of the album cover image underneath much of the cover-up drag of black paint.

As with the first painting in this series, it’s the very basics of abstract painting that seem to be pushing progress along. Color, space, gesture and mark, etc., which leads me to think about how inward and maybe independent abstraction can be. Sure, a title can point to places or things outside the surface of the work, but that seems only marginally related. And maybe people would see a likeness in one way or another, anything from a shape and color combination, to a line or form that reminds them of something, and those observations might cause a viewer to think of something outside of the work itself.

But really, when painting this way, for better or worse, every mark, every choice, every gesture — they all see to point back into the painting itself, all become self-referential, a closed system, a pile of choices that all overlap or undo each other. In some way, it would be like a map of a continent, or rather, a stack of hundreds of maps of the same continent, only throughout all of time. This way, you’d have to realize that somewhere near or at the bottom of the stack, might be an entirely different set of references or locations, but they’d all be describing or related to the same continent being mapped out.