PLATTSBURGH — Brooklyn-based artist and teacher James Antonson always has a “painting collage” in the works.
On canvas, he gets loose with acrylics and oil tints, then cuts his mark making and glues it to another canvas or board.
The Strand Center for the Arts presents his solo exhibition, “Deviations,” which opens Friday with a free gallery reception from 5 to 8 p.m. The show will run until March 28.
Antonson works with a variety of mediums, including drawing, painting, sculpture, printmaking, clay, mixed media, collage and sound art. He received his Bachelor’s of Science in art education from Kutztown University in Pennsylvania and his Master’s of the Arts in art education from Brooklyn College, according to his bio.
Hitting a brick wall led him to painting collages.
“I was doing some seascapes and some glaciers and some mountain paintings. I was doing this and kind of hitting a wall,” he said. “I ended up doing this big mountain painting. It was, like, five by six feet. It’s pretty big. I got a little frustrated, and I was like, ‘You know, what would this look like if I played around with the colors a little bit more?’ and started kind of adding strange marks and lines and different weird colors. I cut it up and made a collage.
“It kind of started that way. It was really exciting because I have done collage in the past, not a ton. Mostly, I was always interested in doing, like, a grid, so just squares or rectangles or something like that. Not the kind of collages you might think about when people do faces or something representational. I was just interested in doing like squares and just see what happens.”
Antonson took regular raw canvases and gessoed them.
“Started scraping and making a lot of exciting colorful marks, and then deciding, ‘Why don’t I try a few of these and chop up a bunch and just see where it goes?’ I ended up making a series and kind of sat around for awhile,” he said. “I tried some long strips, right. It’s kind of like tile. It’s really exciting that way that you can take a canvas, chop it up and glue it onto another canvas or a board and just see what happens.”
The artist ended up being excited about two different processes.
“One is sort of loose and physical,” he said. “Sometimes, I use old credit cards. I use palette brushes and big drywall scrapers. I just started really having a lot of fun doing that. I was really excited about how the grids bumped up against each other. So there’s this very physical part of it, you know, doing that. There might be 10 or 15 different layers of color on there. That is very loose, open and fun, and then I get exacting, and I have to kind of calm down and slow down. I have to slow down and start measuring and cutting straight and doing that kind of thing. For some reason, I didn’t want to make them look as loose.
“When I did the final collage, I wanted to make them look geometric and rigid, and kind a little different than the loose part of the first attempt of putting the color down and mark making.”
Antonson gets sloshy, crazy, fun and loose with acrylics before picking up scissors and ruler to measure and perfectly cut the dry canvas.
“There is some exact cutting, and that’s not my thing. That was another thing where I had to just kind of slow down and say, ‘Well, why don’t I just try it and make it difficult and see where it goes?’” he said.
The artist works in acrylics because they dry faster.
“I can put a fan on it and let it dry in 10 minutes, and I can do another layer immediately,” he said. “I can go down in the basement and do five or six colors.
“I found once glued them down onto the board, I can take a solvent and thin oil paint and add a tint to some of the lines and the grids and some of the cut sections. So that ended up being a little bit magical because oil paint doesn’t do anything to acrylic. It doesn’t change the color. It doesn’t loosen it up and mess it up. You can paint oil right on top of that acrylic, so I was making these sort of tints with solvent, with mineral spirits and stuff like that.”
The tints range from purply-pink or creamy blue.
“Even though there are colors underneath, you can say each section has a certain tint. So that was really nice,” Antonson said.
His palette has dabs of everything, though he leans toward earth tones and brighter colors.
“It’s kind of dark out there,” he said. “It’s a dark time. It I try to cheer myself up, you know. I always love neon. I think neon is kind of fantastic.”
There are 25 works in the show that range from 12 by 12 inches to 48 by 60 inches. Viewers can trace his creative arc from several of his tessellation paintings that are included in the exhibition.
“They are patterns that I was kind of doing before this,” he said. “Tessellation is like an older style. If you think of tiles, it’s kind of like patterning with repetition. No spaces in between. There are a couple of rules. There are a couple of artists who have done it. A lot of times, they are patterns connected almost like puzzle pieces.”