The work I am calling your attention to is the fleshy meat pod on the right side of the image, the one that seems to be fat rolls mounded up on a large fleshy belly. The above image is from an exhibition that Travis Townsend and I had as the Smith Townsend Collaborative at Miami University in Oxford Ohio in Nov 2012. (For more images of that show click this link.)
I don't remember the original idea kernel for this painting but like most of my work, it had something to do with a large and ungainly physical presence. I found the first sketch for this work today as I was roaming the occasionally fertile fields of my sketchbook looking for that long forgotten sketch that must be squeezed to life from pigment and oil.
So here it is just above, the sketch before the pod. The final work is surprisingly similar to its loosely scrawled beginnings but for the top mound. That particular mound of flesh which carried from this initial sketch into the final work, looked too much like a phallus. An adjustment had to be made and in the final painting the top is more like a fleshy thumb and mitten-ed hand pinching upward.
In Oct 2013, Travis and I installed a show at the New Harmony Gallery of Contemporary Art and I brought a stack of work to the gallery not knowing exactly which pieces we would include. Flesh Pod wasn't included in the show at New Harmony because we went with paintings of meat pods that had stronger connections to boats and vessels. The title of that show was "Smith Townsend Collaborative: The Grand Armada."
When I store my large sticky decal paintings, I stick them down to clear plastic and roll them onto cardboard tubes. I tend to store 5 or 6 on the same roll. This image was taken during the New Harmony install and I thought there was something interesting about this semi-transparent stack of pods and how much it emphasizes the flatness of the paintings. In the background you can see a large 3-D pod that I created for this show and in some ways the 3-D pod looks less volumetric than the painting.
The smaller sketch from my sketchbook drawing is not a preparatory drawing for the 3-D pod but it almost could be. One idea I had for the Flesh Pod painting in the beginning was to have it constrained with ropes and chords and in the end the painting wasn't but the 3-D pod was. The future of 3-D flesh pods is uncertain but the connection between original drawing and final work is always part of my process.