![Is [Is]](paintings/paintings_2021/is_is.jpg)
Contact
For questions or to schedule a studio visit : email me at paintings@modino.com
About the artist
dEEn Modino’s paintings coalesce experiences and influences, collapsed and removed from any time and place. The works combine references to the stillness and serenity of nature, 60s sci-fi movies, suburban banality and hours in front of color-saturated cartoons, Florida Holiday Inns with muted colored carpets and pop art flower motif bedspreads, the energy of the urban environment – graffitied and distressed. These experiences along with the bombardment of “information” in our daily lives, are unconsciously ingested, filtered and coded through a variety of new and organic shapes that combine with the abstracted paintings.
Growing up in Ohio in the 1970s dEEn felt as out of place as the Asian art in the house that his father brought back from the Korean war. By the early 80s, he arrived in New York City and started showing at the downtown galleries and DIY art shows in abandoned buildings, performing with bands in underground clubs, and being part of a vibrant scene where artists, musicians, poets and performers all collided in ways that impacted all their work. It was about making art more than making money. He worked as a carpenter, and that started his painting directly on the plywood he could get for free, and because he never liked painting on canvas, not liking the texture or the artistic baggage.He used house paint because it was cheaper than artist’s paint, Re-using and re-treating the plywood by sanding off the paint, felt connected with the distressed wood signs and layered graffiti revealing the city’s life.
By the early 1990s, he founding a graphic design company with a friend that specialized in motion graphics, video, animation and web design. He began merging computer graphics, his own digital art, and combining image layering techniques from digital art with craft processes for the smooth finished surfaces with an illusion of depth. He’s continued this process, combined with found imagery on the street, along with modernist and other earlier influences in his life, creating these paintings.