Endless Outcomes / The Painted Edition
In April of last year a family wrote to me.
They wanted an engagement gift for their son and his fiancée, a couple drawn to the great cliffs and the intense landscape of Acadia National Park in Maine, and to the stargazing there. The photograph from the engagement was taken high above the ocean. It happened to be the same ground I had painted in Cliffside Symphony in 2021, which none of them knew when they found the work.
The original is sculpted oil paint on panel, heavy and hard to ship and hang. The couple was young and had not settled anywhere yet, so it was the wrong gift for the life they were in.
I needed a solution.
A painting that carried the soul of the original but was structurally appropriate.
First - what makes a Painting
I think of a painting, the process and the result together, as the artifact of a performance. You take everything you know about the world, empty it out onto the ground, and rebuild yourself from it. The painting is what is left on the table afterward.
That performance does not happen once. I am a different painter than I was in 2021, and the same subject does not have to exist in only one form. The panel in the studio is one version and the canvas I painted for that couple is another. There is room for many more, each one made by hand and each one different, all of them the same painting.
This year, for the first time, I am opening this up.
During the print drop, each of the seven paintings will be available as a Painted Edition, in a series I am calling Endless Outcomes. Every finished painting is one ending I chose out of many, and the others are still sitting in the work. Imagine a mosaic shaken off the wall, all the stones on the ground, and then rebuilt. That is what these are.
You order in the same forty-eight hours as the prints. I have the canvas printed and stretched, and then I paint into it in the studio in sculpted oil, by hand.
What goes into it is wherever I am now. The painting on my easel is always the most refined thing I have made, and each new work carries the most current way I have of building these surfaces. Going into an image from 2021 with that in hand makes something that is different from the original and the same as it. The detail photographs show it better than I can describe it.
No two will be the same. Each one is treated as its own work with its own spirit, an iteration rather than a copy.
The seven: Finally, the Sun. Night Lights. Violet Rapids. Cave of Emerald Waters. Snow, Stone, Salt. In Abundance. Letting the Blizzard In.
Images of each one and the available sizes will be shared when early access opens.
Each one is signed, comes with a certificate, and ships ready to hang with wire on the back. Allow eight to ten weeks. They are painted after the window closes, and the paint needs time to dry before anything can go in a box. Frames are not required. If you want one, a shadow box suits the texture and the canvas edge.
The shop opens Friday, October 9, at 9:00 AM Eastern and closes Sunday, October 11, at 9:00 AM. Painted Editions are only made from orders placed in that window. The email list gets the link at 8:00 AM.
