Thoughts on New Paintings by Kirk Hayes

These paintings blew my mind.  I was immediately drawn to them when we entered the gallery.  So many aspects about these paintings kept me interested and wanting to observe more.  The first thing I noticed about the series of paintings is that they are all painted on wood.  Well part of it was canvas I think but the bottom half was definitely wood.   Anyways I thought that was interesting because the artist involved hard wood floor into each of his paintings.  Ok now let's get to the obvious stuff...I clearly thought that these were collages, which i thought was totally awesome.  For some reason I love the idea of using canvasas for things besides paint- I discovered that this summer when I met a local photographer who painted canvases black and then glued her photographs to them.  It looked artsy.  I loved it.   Anyways, back to my point, i was intrigued by this guy because i thought he just used paper to make a collage on this big wood/canvas piece.  As i got closer I realized it was oil paint.  Pretty neat, hadn't seen anythign like it before.  I like his style.  However my mind was soon blown compeltely when i realized that EVERYTHING WAS 2D!!! What..? Crazy.  It was unbelievable.  Everything he painted was just made to look like a collage, but it actually wasn't one at all!! I was so impressed- it seems like it would be impossible to do that.  One of his paintings really stood out to me.  The one of what seemed to be a dead body wrapped in a sheet laying across two chairs.  It was secured by three different big red knots, which looked SO real.  There were smeared sploches of red paint around the knots, and at first I couldn't tell if the artist purposley put them there to make it look like the blood of a dead body, or if it was an accident since he needed such thick strokes to make the knots look real.  I still can't figure out which is correct, but it doesn't really matter because either way it would make sense and it is still awesome.

Even though that Hayes didn't actually make a collage, it still movivated me to do something of that sort on canvas.  It would be fun to experiment and see what I can come up with.  I've always wanted to use paper as a substitute for paint anyways - my friend who goes to tcu did an amazing self portrait made out of paper.
-Brooke