I was just at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art admiring the Stephen Batura’s show Edits with his wonderful acrylic paintings that were based on his collages of fashion. However, its difficult to see the ‘fashion’ in his art because of the closeup views and chopped up angles. That’s what makes this artwork so interesting to me.  Stephen Batura has

a focus on texture that extends beyond the given context.

The above quotation about his artwork resonates with my own intentions in my Arborglyphs artwork. Texture is the focus, NOT the representation of the original image. While Batura’s paintings seem quite abstract in a glance, upon much inspection you see elements of reality – the flow of drapery, the collar of a shirt, or a portion of a body part.  

I also like the way Batura uses triangles and other sharp angles that seem to overlap and collide with each other. There is a sense of layering here. However Batura’s use of a typical rectangular canvas with the angled imagery centered on top of a bland background color was boring.  I think the paintings would have been more effective if he had created ‘shaped’ canvases.  I created many shaped paintings in the past, and found that makes for an interesting departure from the typical horizontal shape.