Jack D. Titus, Coyle, Damaged (Portrait of Anna Vargas), Watercolor Mixed Media, 80”x27”
T he B ones W i th i n : J ack D . T itus by Kristin Gentry
Looking atop, within, and beneath the layers, Jack D. Titus explores the earth and human body through a sensual touch of forms, textures, and compositions. Titus is not only a watercolor mixed media artist, but a three-dimensional constructional artist. Titus’ work is organized into three bodies of work. Describing his most recent body of work, Titus said, “In general terms, paintings from the Fragments series are about loss and the passage of time. Specifically, these images are metaphors for the manner in which even our most intimate and precious experiences become altered, distorted, fragmented and illusive when viewed through the imperfect prism of our memory.” Fragments 38 (The Johanna Suite) draws upon a delicately captured moment created by the composition of the woman’s body with her limbs drawn in close. The textures of her skin and background come in an out of clarity as we move throughout the piece. Shapes and lines are detailed in some areas, and then fade away in other. Titus created this piece, as well as other works in the Fragments series, through a mixture of watercolor, photo emulsion and pencil techniques. From the beginning of each piece, Titus works to create both an improvisational and structured piece simultaneously. The nude model is given full freedom to create the poses she wishes, without any direct instruction from Titus. By giving his models their own right to create natural and comfortable poses, Titus can let his art create its own life without directly orchestrating every aspect of creation. Titus then develops his film in a darkroom using a photo emulsion process so that the images are directly created on the same paper he will be painting on. Due to the nature of the photo emulsion process, the images often come out with blurred imagery, lost details, and missing information. This directly parallels Titus’ beliefs about how our memory works. Titus then edits and crops the images so that only the necessary composition is remaining. He continues to work with colored pencil atop the photographic image emphasizing the colors and textures he desires. Alongside this process, Titus also creates background surfaces with both watercolor and pencil. These surfaces are often reminiscent of earth and skin textures. He tediously cuts around the cropped model creating the positive piece, and cuts out an identical shape in the watercolor piece. The pencil-colored photo and the watercolor backgrounds are then delicately adhered together with rice paper to create a new image of watercolor and photo emulsion. The new constructed piece is all on the
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