splitting the team

 Genna and I have been together for 13 years this July, collaborating for over ten, and traveling to festivals for about eight.  We both work from home and we spend around four hundred hours a year in a van together.  People often ask us jokingly what this is like, as they assume its probably filled with strife and irritation, and I always answer that it's fantastic...89% of the time.  The truth is that it's fantastic 98% of the time, but 89% is funnier.  98% sounds both fake and cloyingly sweet.


There was lots of fighting at the very beginning of our travels.  It generally revolved around the setting up of our tent/display and my irrational nerves over traveling.  Over time, we worked out all of the kinks and got the fighting down to maybe once every three or four shows.  We've done our respective 'setting up' jobs so many times now that we barely need to speak to one another.  It's like a mime ballet.

A handful of weeks ago, fate conspired to split our team.  Running low on work during a 5 week 'tour', we decided I would sit out a show and stay home to paint.  Shortly after making that decision, we were invited to the ribbon cutting ceremony for the 2012 HGTV Green Home during the time we were scheduled to be at the Brookside Art Annual in Kansas City.  Reluctantly, I agreed to stay back and attend and leave sweet Genna on his own for a second festival.

Secretly, I was delighted.  I felt like a child that was getting to stay home from school.  No sweaty set up...no sitting around for three days in the heat (or rain, or wind) waiting.  Our team splitting experiment is now nearly done and I can say without hesitation that I never want to do it again!  I missed the sweaty set up.  I missed the sitting around.  I missed the dinners and drinks with our artist friend posse.  I even missed the riding in the van.  To rub salt in the wound, Genna gave himself some little vacations in between shows and visited museums, antique stores, and Elvis's house.  Jerk.  Mostly, though, I missed Genna.  Our everyday mime ballet is hard to do with one person.  I think he felt the same.  It took him around six hours to break down our booth from the first show.

On the plus side, I attended the Green Home ribbon cutting with my mother and my very best friend, and it was a beautiful, proud moment that I was more than happy to share with them.  Serenbe, the site of the Green Home, is a 1000 acre wooded retreat that I would highly recommend checking out if you're anywhere near the Atlanta area.  Dinner and breakfast at the Farmhouse were spectacular.  We toured the Green Home and took a hundred blurry iphone pictures in front of our painting.  All in all a great two days that I won't ever forget.

That said, I'm ready for my man to come home.  I'm bored of my own company and ready to resume our 24 hour a day collaboration!

HGTV Green Home Artist 2012

We are two of them! Or I guess since we're a team...We are one of them! The designers of the new HGTV Green Home at Serenbe selected our "Boy Line, Bike Tangle" as the focal artwork in the main living area of the home. The Green Home 2012 special is playing everyday from now until the house is given away on June 1st, so DVR it and check it out!

See it online here.

We have more than 60 new paintings available now on the website, including two smaller versions of the "Bike Boys".

This weekend kicks off 5 straight weekends of travel for us...Main Street Ft Worth, Magic City Art Connection in Birmingham, Brookside Art Annual in Kansas City, Artisphere in Greenville SC, and the Northern Virginia Fine Arts Festival in Reston VA. Hoping to see you somewhere along the way!

new year, new ideas

Being a full time painter, its easy to find myself in a rut with imagery, technique, ever-thing. Its a huge blessing that people think enough of what Genna and I do to want to give us money for it, but it's also the tiniest of curses as it keeps me partially confined to the style that we've come to be recognized for.

What I think is great about this 'problem' is that it's allowed (forced) me to sink very deeply into my technique and work it out to a level of consistency and fluidity that I would never have achieved if I could jump from media to media and method to method whenever I felt the urge.

Instead, I achieve change glacially...more fine tuning than broad strokes. Lately, though, there's something brewing. My process for ages has been painting largely in the negative shapes. So, instead of painting trees, I would paint the sky around it, allowing the underpainting layer to stand in for the tree form. Faces are often defined by cutting in the background form to it's edge. So, a few weeks ago I began this piece:


Like this:


Instead of painting the sky shape, I painted the trees. This doesn't seem like a huge deal, but to me it looks and feels totally different...kind of like writing with my left hand. The bottom half of the piece was completed with my usual technique, but the top remained entirely a positive painting with the underpainting representing the sky without any tinkering on my part.

Then I took that idea even a little farther and made this:


The underpainting stands entirely pristine as the sky.

And again here:


Then last week I took the plunge and advanced this idea even further. In this image, I painted only the figures and let Genna's underpainting serve as both the sky and the ground.


While this is an image I've worked with before, this feels like a completely new idea to me. One thing I really like about this piece is that while the figures are all painted in the positive, the negative painting technique still exists within each figure. Like with the ties of this girl's bonnet and the detailing of her ruff:


I have plans for a whole new series based on this concept but have typed enough for now and can't imagine anyone read this far. I'll show it to you once it happens!

an embarrassment of riches

Studio mate Joey brought me a great album of old photos a few months ago that touched off an all out photo buying free-for-all at the Grushovenko household. Over the course of a week or so I 'won' around a dozen ebay auctions for large lots of old pictures. Boxes of hundreds of new images began arriving at our house. For the first few days this was almost unbearably exciting, followed by days of mild excitement, followed by a few days of 'eh', followed by a feeling of mild nausea as if I had eaten too much sugar. I became so overwhelmed by the sheer number of possibilities that I basically had to hide them all from myself and turn back to some tried-and-true references for a while.

It's been long enough now that my image indigestion has abated and I have begun pulling out my new babies and working them into our repertoire. Here is a newbie, "Three Boating".


30" x 40" oil on linen, $1800

And here is "Four Layered Lounge"...my new favorite.


36" x 36" oil on linen, $2200


Many of our new purchases didn't make the cut for use in our work, and some of those have gone into a 'wallpaper' type project at the gallery:


Paintings in this photo are by our good friend Melinda Clair.

Greenville Open Studios

Hi all! This weekend is our very first 'Greenville Open Studios' weekend. We are incredibly excited to be a part of this fantastic event. Our visit here for the 2010 show was the clincher in our decision to make the move to the upstate. Over 100 artists are opening their studios and homes this weekend for the public to come in and see their work and their process.

Here are a few pictures of our space, featuring 30 new pieces from myself and Genna, new paintings by Steve Frenkel and Melinda Clair, and fabric art by our Nastiya.













Hoping to see everyone!

1203 Pendleton Street, Greenville SC 29611
Saturday 10-6
Sunday 12-6

grushovenko gallery pics

Hi everybody! We're two weeks open at Grushovenko Gallery and I finally got around to taking a few photos. They start from the outside and proceed more or less from the font to the back. Genna built the wall just inside the front door facing out that has the bathing girls painting on it. It's on casters so it can be moved around the room and also provides storage for our extra pieces (Genna is a genius). The last few pics are of our neighbor Joey and his studio. Our spaces connect through the west wall.

Pics are clickable.

Grushovenko Gallery is open every Friday and Saturday from 10-5 and every first Friday of the month from 6-9. We're at 1203 Pendelton Street, Greenville.

tapeworm

The opening of our new gallery has progressed in my mind from 'place to park our inventory while we're not traveling' to 'all I can think about'. Don't tell Genna, he thinks I still have everything in it's proper perspective.

Thursday we moved in furniture. This morning I started bringing in all of what I like to call 'the giblets' (my nonsensical term for accessories). I drug in a full car load of pots, quilts, art books, and rugs and then met with my gallery neighbor Joey Bradley to work out the design for our new signage.

We'll have a vertical 'art gallery' banner hanging above the front door and window vinyl with 'Grushovenko Gallery, fine art and craft' on the window. I picked out this font:



which I thought was really au courant. Joey informed me that OCR A Extended is embarrassingly 2009 and totally gauche (my words, his sentiment). He basically told me that he could not be associated with such a loser, so in the end we settled on the font that Ed Ruscha uses in his paintings:



It's called 'tapeworm'



and Mr. Ruscha refers to it as:



and that's exactly what I was going for, so...perfect. Hopefully it will still be in vogue by the time the signage goes up next week. (I kid Joey. He was very sweet and helpful and I always appreciate his excellent advice.)

I had no idea that designers had such strong feelings about fonts. I did, however, know that most people have grown to hate comic sans with a white hot passion. My good friend Kathrine Allen-Coleman had a fantastic, foul mouthed little movie about the poor fellow on her facebook feed today. Enjoy! (Unless you're not a big fan of cursing, then please ignore.)

I'm Comic Sans, Asshole from joehollier on Vimeo.