Select Poured Crayola Crayon Paintings, plus earlier Oil & Acrylic, and Mixed Media Paintings
Three Sebergs 2015 30x80x2” Crayola crayon, gesso, interior door *available
Image cropped and skewed from American artist Jamie Adams’ oil painting niagaradown 2013. Austin’s first graduate advisor at Washington University in St. Louis’ Sam Fox School of Art and Architecture.
The Seine (sin) 2015 32x80x2” Crayola crayon, gesso, interior door *available
Distorted image of Gustave Courbet’s Les Demoiselles des bords de la Seine (été) 1857, originally exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1857. Bequeathed to the French state in 1906, now in the permanent collection of Petite Palais museum.
Architecture and Morality (after Falkowski) 2015 30x80x2 acrylic on interior door *available
Distorted image screenshot from American artist Andrew Falkowski’s faculty page at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where Austin received Falkowski’s tutelage during a semester-long painting seminar course. The original digital image documents a photographed a cropped perspective of an installation of paintings and sculptures from a 2013 exhibition at the Suburban gallery in Chicago, that Austin only experienced virtually over a year after the exhibition with Karl Erickson titled Architecture and Morality. Although initially encouraged by Falkowski, Austin was promptly unfriended and ghosted by Falkowski following his move to graduate school in St. Louis, to Austin’s dismay and regret.
Still Life After Picasso 2014 30x40x2” acrylic on canvas *SOLD Kentucky
Original image sourced from Picasso’s 1922 oil painting Still Life, which captured Austin’s attention while browsing the modern art collection at the Art Institute of Chicago.
Insolated (after Picabia) 2014 18x36x2” acrylic on canvas *available
My first larger work completed as a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago was this skewed, distorted, transposed, and redacted image of Francis Picabia’s 10x10’ oil painting Edtaonisl (Ecclesiastic) from 1913, prominently displayed in the Art Institute of Chicago’s permanent collection. This work relates to Picabia’s experience aboard a transatlantic ship, en route to the opening of the Armory Show, North America’s first major exhibition of modern art. Picabia was amused by two fellow passengers—a Polish dancer named Stacia Napierskowska and a Dominican priest who could not resist the temptation of watching her rehearse with her troupe. The word Edtaonisl—an acronym made by alternating the letters of the French words étoile (star) and dans[e] (dance), a process analogous to the artist’s shattering and recombining of forms. He subtitled the work Ecclesiastic, hinting at the juxtaposition of the spiritual and the sensual. Austin rearranged the letters again in anagram play to ‘insolated,’ a synonym for ‘enlightened.’
eternal memory 2011 30x72x2” acrylic and oil on canvas *available
This triptych was inspired while my wife was pregnant with our first child in conflation of my earliest fatherly desire to sire three sons whose potentials are depicted in the underpainting of a repeated fetal skeleton specimen initially viewed at Philadephia’s Mütter Museum , meditation on a Hans Hofmann painting from 1962 titled Memoria in Aeternum from the permanent collection at MoMA that I distorted through horizontal elongation, and my obsessive preoccupation with a premature death of my unknown child indemnified by spiritual metamorphosis represented by the anamorphic monarch butterfly in contrast to the skull painted by Hans Holbein (the younger) in his 1533 masterpiece, the Ambassadors.
Skewed Ali 2011 28.5x96x20.5” acrylic on shaped-canvas *available
Anamorphic, distorted derivative of painting originally completed in 2008 titled Big Ali.
Maj. Gen. J.E.B. Stuart 2010 30x40x2” oil on canvas *SOLD Virginia
Austin is a direct descendant (*great,great,great,great,great grandson) of Stuart who was ‘the eyes and ears of Gen. Lee’ for the Confederacy during the American Civil War and his father-in-law, Col. Philip St. George Cooke who was ‘the Father of the U.S. Cavalry,’ for the Union. This controversial lineage is a part of Austin’s inherited identity that he continues to digest and reconcile.
This painting is in the permanent collection of the Laurel Hill Museum.
Hunter S. Thompson 2009 24x26x2” acrylic on canvas *available
Image based on original March, 1974 photograph captured by Al Satterwhite in Cozumel Mexico.
King Louis 2009 24x48x2” acrylic on canvas *SOLD Indiana
Original image cropped from screenshot of Louis Armstrong’s wikipedia page from an uncredited World-Telegram staff photographer win 1957. Interested in the painting techniques of American painter, Chuck Close, Austin reverse-engineered Close’s printmaking methodology in order to develop his own derivative system for creating mosaic-style paintings from simple marks and geometric symbols meticulously layered upon one another in a sequence of democratic value distribution across the picture plane.