Art of Don DeLeva

FEK315 walks in threw the door, looks up at the clock and sees a wedge of time, then walks a few more steps to see what happened within that chunk. "15 minutes? It took me 15 minutes to walk through the door? What the hell did I do in that pie wedge?" Goth Cindy Turns to him. "See, this is what  am talking about. You have no idea that you were talking to me about Long Range Missiles. You where calling them sniper weapons." FEK315 looks at the ground "Cindy, I am really not sure I understand what you are saying." "You loose time FEK." "How is that?" "Dah phuck I should know, your the lunatic!"  FEK315 grabs Cindy's latex suited hips with grappling hands, pulls her close to his face and dives deep into her eyes.  His zombie stare makes her shutter and slightly surrender. "Goth Cindy I know where you are. I see you in your head with Auto Cannon rounds passing you like light coated street flies, whistling razors c

Its funny how I tell you I don't work from sketches and then the 2 days ago I doddle some image and now I want to work from the sketch...LOL! I'll post the sketch. my image of Zen: George Condo Artist.

It's rare I work from sketches mainly because the sketch is part of the work. I usually start on a panel and work out all my ideas there. "Preliminary Sketches" are the being of the work so to leave them out is like throwing away the bones. For illustrators "Preliminary Sketches" are were you work out your mistakes. I am not an illustrator. Every mark I make is an important part of the final work. Sometimes a mark is there from the begin of the work and becomes a pivotal part of the painting. The evidence of the mark is exemplified with the constant rebuilding of the original mark. How many times have you made a sketch of an idea only to realize you like the sketch more then the final work? That is because the spontaneity is worked out of the piece.  The first marks are important, they record the raw emotion that caused you to record the idea in the first place. Even if the original marks are scraped out the evidence of your erassing the marks are still there.

Robert Motherwell. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_evtvqBawY

With my new job I am finally working 40 hours a week..it's a good thing! I started working as a large format digital press and digital cut operator.  This has finally given me the opportunity to concentrate on painting.   As far as my art work goes,  I sold all of my inventory last month and gained 2 new collectors who each bought 4 pieces or more. Now my studio is empty, no shows lined up, money coming in and no pressure for sales. Sales pressure is poison to me, needing to sell art to eat really effects my work in a trite illustrative way. Over the last 8 years found out that my audience is limited.   Lately, I have been looking at the paintings of Franz Klein, I find Klein's monumentality and heaviness attractive. His works like "Le Gros" have a permanence like structures of iron. ( Mark Di Suvero comes to mind. ) Looking at them closer the way his grays, blacks and whites interact with the texture of brush stroke give each work a quality of portrait or

Visit my website for more information www.dondeleva.com .

Beacon, acrylic on panel, 5x7 2.2013 Control:Beacon#3 has landed and the weather couldn't be better. The Russian meteor can be seen in the upper left quadrant of the painting. Well maybe at this point it wasn't Russian I think it was more just a meteor because it hadn't landed yet in Russia. It was just passing by the planet JimJim 12 in the constellation HeyBroThatsMySalami. side note: Dr Sally Tweezenphoner was eating a salami sandwich when she was tweeting the name of the constellation to a fellow astronomer when her dog ran off with her sandwich .  

Lately I have been reading about the Art Market and how it is changing the definition of Art itself. Here is a good article on what I am talking about. http://www.villagevoice.com/2013-02-06/art/uptown-money-kills-downtown-art/full/ It's an interesting read.

This year I decided to create 6 to 12 of the best works I am capable of, I have one work completed already it took about 4 months and 6 different versions to create. Monarch, Acrylic on panel, 16x20, 1.2013 Last year I decided to switch from oil to acrylic mainly because I wanted to get back into drawing and printing. That's a logical reason isn't it? After 16 years of oil painting I kept coming up with the same answers to the same problems. I needed new answers to take my work in a new direction so I decided acrylics was the best way to keep painting.  (Hold on the printing and drawing are coming) I also really missed drawing and printing and as I painted in acrylics I started to realize that you can draw on the dry paint, not only, that but I started wiping out areas of paint with my hands like I would wipe an etching plate. You can do that in oil but it makes a hell of a mess. In acrylic all it does is dry on you hand, and as it drys on the work you ca

As I go deeper in to this new phase of painting I start to realize that I am painting White Collar workers as Heroes and Villains, the major players in the game of a country's economic health. At this point I feel that I am working with the mythology of the white collar worker not to an end but recognizing their role in power from a world stand point. the Interview: acrylic on clayboard, 5x7, 10.24.12 Suit 7: acrylic on clayboard, 5x7, 10.26.12

I believe these portraits are celebrations of the technological worker, the Tecky. I wasn't sure for a long time why these portraits were coming out of me. At first I thought it had something to so with the 99% demonstrations, the bank debacles and the corporate corruption. Maybe this has something to do with it but it seems so negative and I wasn't doing research to find out more about these problems, so I knew this really wasn't what I was painting. It just didn't seem correct, the images were too comical for such a heavy topic. Today I was writing an artist statement about my work and it occurred to me after seeing my Dia De Los Muertos portraits of 2 years ago that what I am painting are Techys. Thus the cubism and angular lines with the business suits. These are portraits of people who write code all day and invent the coolist new apps on your phone. They are celebrations of the people in technology.

How is it when you can't put emotions to metaphor?

Suit 2: acrylic on panel, 8.2012

Suit #1: Acrylic, 8.16.2012, 8x8 This is the first painting in my Suit series. This body of work is a comment on the restructuring of the banking industry and the core values of handling Americas money by large corporations and banks.

Some artist's art is their fame and their product is secondary.

I find myself still in the middle of reinventing myself. My paintings seem to be about busy work right now. Figuring out what it means to paint with acrylics is redefining my imagery. Inspiration wise I seem to be floating between Guston and Franz Klien. Size wise I have shrunk down to 5x7, 5x5, 12 x 16s, mainly because of my neck problems. I hope soon I can find some groove because right now I feel like I am painting to be busy. This wall street tie and jacket series seems to predictable and illustrative. At this point I do not want to become illustrative but I am wondering how much illustration people need to understand these paintings are not about abstraction.

Some people call me a Surrealist, I am not. I don't paint dreams. Some people call me a Hallucinatory. However, I am not tiring to get you to see something I didn't paint. There was a time I was tiring to do this, but now my work seems to be more about the act of painting and the final image is secondary. I am concerned about the quality work of the final result but the end images come about by crystallization of thought at the time of creation. What I do take from the Surrealists is automatic thought. I add emotion from the Abstract Expressionists and use the everyday as an inspiration. It is really important to understand that I "find" myself working this way. After years of training as a printmaker and trying to end up with a specific image in the end felt like I was becoming an illustrator, I felt constricted and predicable. I see Illustration as the process of creating with a specific final image in mind, thus the "sketch" and the preliminary works t

Title: Portrait of Philip K Dick, Acrylic, 6.2012

Here is the final to the Ironman portrait. I have been thinking of doing a series of these.  It's a great excuse to work in red and yellow.

This week I was asked to create a work for a show based on a super hero, if you know me at all you'll know I picked IronMan. I thought about creating a work based on bankers being Heros but after the latest buffoonery with Morgan Stanley, Chase Manhattan and the Facebook stocks I realized that at least Tony Stark is fictional and seems to care a little bit for his fellow man. So I took the painting below and started to create Ironman over it. Here is a phone shot of what it looks like now. I know it's fairly pedestrian at this point but keep in mind that this is the beginning sketches. The idea at this point is to create several cells at once with a technique called dynamism.