Pieces like “Blue
Crab Abstract” and
“Herding” demon-strate
Love’s ability
to merge stylistic
interests. In the for-mer,
Love employs a
color palette of blue,
green, and yellow
to create a blended,
swirling interior for
the painting’s name-sake
creature. The
thin, swirling paint
application simulta-neously
flattens the
animal and increases
the composition’s
sense of movement.
White paint is applied
throughout for high-light
and contrast,
and the background
has a sponge-like tex-ture
that recalls sea
foam. These abstract-ing
techniques soften
the lines between
representation and
impression, allowing
the artist and the
audience to interpret
as well as view the
content.
The ocean figures
prominently in just
about everything
Love does, including
his painting practice.
“A majority of what I do is ocean-related,” he says. “I grew up on
the ocean and surfing is a big priority for me. When I see wildlife out
there on the water, I come home and start researching it. And that’s
where a lot of my painting inspiration comes from.”
Love spends a lot of time researching and sampling images
before he begins a sea life piece, and he jokes good-humoredly that
anatomy was not part of his degree program.
In works like “The Falls” and “Storm Front,” his admiration and love
for the ocean is particularly apparent.
Love’s paintings frequently feature hard precision, tight brush-strokes,
The Falls, 30 x 40 inches, acrylic on canvas.
and fine line work, but in “Storm Front” he relaxes control a
bit. Darkened waves in the foreground crash loosely and violently
on the sand while storm clouds entering the scene from the top
right corner seem to move quickly and ominously. The high contrast
of light and dark shades grant drama and intensity to the work. The
resulting image represents the ocean as an impressive, almost fore-boding
entity, soothing and beautiful and faintly dangerous.
His oeuvre contains many images of the ocean, often of beautiful,
rising swells, inspired by his time spent surfing. It’s a lifestyle he says
is hard to explain but powerful, involving a combination of calm
transcendence and exhilaration. The complex experience is depicted
in some of his more abstracted paintings like “Tempest,” “Sunrise
Surf,” and “New Born.”
In these works, creative color palettes, gestural brushstrokes,
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WBM september 2018