Artist to offer two shows
In his west-end studio, Thrush Holmes makes giant paintings, mostly of flowers, hair bands and the occasional cat.
Whatever you make of that, it’s been a potent career strategy, vaulting the 34-year-old artist to considerable fame.
His current show at Mike Weiss in New York until Oct. 17 is a tough commute for hometown fans, so he’s doing them a solid: a weeklong exhibition the artist himself is putting on in his Geary St. studio, starting Oct. 19.
We stopped in on him in the middle of production for both shows to see how the pieces get put together.
Raw canvas
“All my screen-printing pieces are on canvases used first as a drop cloth on the floor. A clean canvas can be daunting; having some gestures already imposed helps break it up for me.”
Flower and neon
“I might have done this in one pass, maybe two. I might have made six or eight versions of this. (With the neon) I’m always playing around with different ways of framing.”
Cat + hammer
“It’s a drawing I pulled from the Internet. Black Cat (the studio cat) is mythological here. He kind of rules the place, so I’m just influenced by cats in general. Plus, there needs to be some lightness here. Things get pretty heavy sometimes.”
Screen-print painting
“I’ve been doing the flower paintings for too long, maybe five or six years. The screens really freed me from that I think. It was liberating.”
Palettes
“I made a painting using a grid of used palettes like these. I like it when they get a second life. I probably have 100 of these saved now; I’m not sure for what yet, but something.”
Stack of small paintings
“Those are all paintings I started. I’ll do a first pass, but sometimes I can’t even look at them. They end up getting mistreated. It could be a month before I can look at them again.”