Big Belly Energy, 2022

oil on canvas
72”x 84” (183cm x 213cm)

Big Belly Energy, an impressively-sized canvas (depicting a cropped view of several colorful stuffed animals, is part of the Belly sub-series within the Stuffed Animal Pile. Though many of the formal elements of earlier Piles are present here, zooming in on just one section of a pile allowed me to shift focus from the animals themselves to the pure beauty of texture and color, explored at a grand scale.

As the title suggests, an integral quality of this piece is the energy of gesture that went into the creation process. It is this capture of the right painting tempo that gives the final result an enticing aura that can arrest attention.

I encourage the viewer to get up close to the canvas, stand at “painter’s distance” - about two feet away from the center of the painting. As you approach it, the figurative suggestion of stuffed animals as subject matter starts falling away and the forms become increasingly more abstracted… once you are just a few feet away, the highlights and shadows will converge around you and the entire composition will wrap in a spiral in your field of vision.

My aim was to suggest an infinite expanse that continues on beyond the edges of the painting, and what you see here is but a small snapshot of an endlessly vast terrain of varying and unique textures.