Dennis Hollingsworth

Rivera: Classroom

Enginimal.

Diego Rivera had a touch of magical realism in him, didn't he?* Animation seems to be what we as artists do to the world.

I've always liked the vocabulary of forms found under the hoods of automobiles. I went into my attic and snapped these photos (here and a close up here) of what was the last in a line of investigation into a lexicon of form I found in engines.

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A brief note:

Coming out of school, in order to paint in affirmation (contra the death of painting narrative urged by my critical theory soaked faculty), I started by inventing a kind of "battery" by sandwiching a freewheeling underpainting with a tightened and abstracted formalism that was derived from letter forms. Eventually, the two layers found sympathy with each other, kind of like Ed Ruscha's operation but in reverse.

Applying both sides of Darwin's Law (a proliferation of types in plentitude and then a cultivation of the best types in scarcity), I evolved what became three independent investigations: Leaf Blower Paintings, images taken first from the gasoline powered leaf blowing gardeners ubiquitous here in Southern California (I loved the connection to Rivera and the worker-as-subject); Glaze Paintings, that were painting with successive glazes of alkyd resin (it reminded me of watching the radar, images emerging from the process, grease pencil marks on a glass screed) and Wet into Wet paintings, the predecessor to what I am painting today.

It was 1996 when I steered away from the sandwich conceit and let the Wet into Wet dictate it's own terms. Lil' Louisiana, 1999 was the last point of contact in the Leaf Blower paintings. Like my architectural background in which I hold a hard-fought-for license to practice architecture in the state of California; I never say never either to architecture or to a resumption of the other roads in painting I've trod in the past. The trouble is, I only have time to do the kind of work I'm doing now!

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*I admit, I must be misusing the term magical realism here...