Dennis Hollingsworth

The Dog, monoprints at Cirrus

Untitled #1
2012
Silkscreen and lithography monoprint, inkjet collage
48 x 35 1/2 inches

Images of the edition are here.

Cirrus Gallery
542 S. Alameda St.
Los Angeles, CA 90013
Tuesday-Saturday 10am- 5pm

(213) 680-3473
www.cirrusgallery.com

The Dog

Goya painted The Dog at the end of his life as he took refuge in a villa near Madrid. After initially painting the walls with conventionally inspiring images, he overpainted them with what we know today as his Black Paintings. I mark the beginning of my career in art with a visit to the Prado when I was a young teenager, and because of this, Goya's work has been my touchstone.

With this fourth monoprint project at Cirrus, I wanted to find a new way (at least for myself) to reveal the liquid world of ink and the peculiar physical dynamics of the print medium. I settled on conjuring fields of fractal pattern derived from the peel of paint between pliable sheets, the result of which was delivered to the bed of the press.

Multiple passes floated color over color and soon, the atmosphere of The Dog began to bloom on the paper. The corollary of the turbulence of Peninsular War of Goya's time to our own global problems today is made with caution. But the train of events that sprung from the American and French Revolution and had since rampaged throughout Europe is an integral part of the movement of modernity that has accelerated through the centuries, the ripples and echoes criss cross the world to this day for generations to come. Change brings uncertainty and dread and for this I drew the dark veil of Goya's Black Paintings down across the colorful lithographic inks with a black silkscreen whose fractal pattern is the same as that below.

The Dog is as simple as a figure in a field. The creature is a figure of fragile hope. The figure in these monoprints are ink jet avatars culled from the language of facture which has become typical to my painting practice. These spiny hemispheres of paint, resembling sea urchins, I call them monads, a name inspired by Gottfried Leibniz. They are, for this project, my dogs.

-Dennis Hollingsworth, 2012, Los Angeles