Anthony B. Creeden

Region: Midwest

Website: http://www.anthonybcreeden.org

City / State: Austin, TX

I am fascinated with the materials and techniques familiar in a painter’s language, reconfiguring and generating them into something new.

In some of my paintings, wildly colorful surfaces built up with egg tempera are cropped by the intervention of tinted glass, propped on handmade aluminum brackets. The tilted pane distorts the abstract composition behind it and emphasizes the playful, figurative relationships between the painting, glass, and hardware. Similar figurative elements appear in the Casca- Grossa series, where I lay down marks in primary pigments, quickly constructing the basic planes of a portrait. Translucent egg tempera on rough, unprimed linen speaks to my interest in traditional painting materials.

Coming from a long line of carpenters, machinists, and other hands-on laborers, I have, over time, absorbed not only skills in craft and manual work but also a vocabulary around masculinity and issues of class. This background encourages me to question image and form in non-traditional ways, and to imbue the making process with a personally meaningful narrative.