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The milesdecoster.com site has been redesigned as of Nov. 2011. More work will be added as time permits, as will some responsive design components to make a better use of smaller screens and touch interaction. The previous version of the site is still available at Previous Site.
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Recent work
Here is a selection of recent work in a variety of mediums including some new paintings that combine sporting events, board games, and various genres of painting, some new images in the Uccello Rosso series, people that live inside my head and whatever else happens to be in progress.
Landscapes
Landscapes, real, remembered or imagined, continue to be an essential part of my imagery. Memories of the Mississippi River and Missouri farms, the fields of corn and soy beans I drive through on my way to and from Kutztown, or the view out the third floor window on a snowy day in Reading generate the basic images which only take solid form through the act of painting.
Figures and faces
The human form (and the odd cat or cow, now and then) is always an interesting challenge. Self-portraits are rightly of little interest to anyone else, but the model is cheap. People that live inside my head, is a series exploring my own particular collection of imagined persons who apparently wish to escape my head into the world of representation.
Prints and books
Making a work of art that exists as multiple instances is an interesting proposition. I first wrote "multiple copies" but that is not quite correct as prints and books are not copies of some singular original but are each the equal of the other. I made some cheap offset-printed books and prints in the'70s and '80s, but the advent of the World Wide Web and the ubiquity of digital printers and print on demand have made that genre less interesting for me.
Chess and games
Like many at the time, I got hooked on chess when Bobby Fischer played Boris Spassy for the world championship in 1972. Though my board play never really developed beyond a patzer, the logic and the imagery have stayed with me. In progress are a series of 64 chess boards depicting real and fictious games which together form a large chess board. Table hockey, slot car racing and ping pong were also favorites and will, I suspect, sooner or later find their way into the mix.
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Conceptual art
The term "conceptual art" has an overtone of pretentiousness about it, as if other forms of art were lacking in concept, but it is widely used and I can think of no better term for some of the work I do.
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The archive
Here is a some earlier work, which in my case means before 1993. I chose that year only as it was the year I moved from the midwest to the east coast, and is otherwise of no particular significance. Included here are some images of Crumbs, the school newspaper of the Art Institute of Chicago where I attended graduate school in the late 1970s and a few things from my undergraduate days at Wahington University in St. Louis.
Miles DeCoster
Another Uccello Rosso completed.
No title yet, but just finished. Casein on panel. 24" x 24".
