It has been a while since I've last updated this blog. I would get done with a couple pieces, but already be onto the next couple, and want to include those as well. So, here are 4 new paintings. Since I also like to foster any art conversation, I'm also including some contextual thoughts pertaining to my work. Please feel free to let me know what you think, or if you have other ideas to add, or anything! Thanks!
From Chesil Beach, 105 x 100 cm, 3/2011
From Portland Bill, 96.5 x 178 cm, 3/2011
From Under the A46, 91.5 x 122 cm, 6/2011
From Near Bath Bus Station, 110 x 150 cm, 5/2011
I believe that evolution is a process, not a point to which things ascend. I think that art follows a similar process, not a progression. Progression, end- points, working toward something greater yet to come – all these imply the idea of an as-yet unreached finality that can somehow be gained through our personal or collective striving. But evolution is a process, non-cyclical and without an end. It doesn’t move creatures forward or back on a scale of development. Creatures respond to their environment. The process of their responding is named evolution. They don’t strive to evolve any more than one strives to age, it simply happens. In the same way, art is a response to cultural climates, the world as experienced and responded to by people. There is no progression of ideas, just ideas that change in response to the cultural climate changes.
My own work questions of the nature of our existence, the way we perceive our every day experiences. I am interested in questioning the structured thinking and assumptions of Western culture through subverting the expectations inherent in the Western tradition of painting. My paintings can be accessed or understood through many other mediums. For example, poetry has a sensual quality, an ability to express an understanding through the senses, that is found in my work. My paintings can also be understood through the lens of philosophy. Henri Bergson, Delueze and Guattari, and Brian Massumi all explore similar concepts through their words that I reach through painting. One might also access my work through music, or even through food (as I generally wish I could eat my paints due to their sensuous color and texture). While my influences are varied, it is this synesthesia of sensations, emotions, and concepts – the movement between them as one becomes the next – I am after in my work. Epheme-reality. My work attempts to question this endlessly abstract thing we call life.
My work is influenced by Eastern thought, specifically by the aesthetic concept in Japan called Wabi-Sabi. Wabi is the projection of simplicity, meagerness. Sabi is the atmosphere of solitude, and of attentiveness to impermanence – the ephemeral. When using the term aesthetic, I am using it in the sense of a lens that I see the world through. It is the filter for my experiences. It is an underlying mood, or mise-en-scene, that I try and communicate. This feeling functions in a cathartic way for me during the process of painting, as well as for the viewer as they connect with the work. I want the viewer to engage with the sensations and emotions that might come across through the image.
While much of Japanese art has this Wabi Sabi aesthetic at the heart of its meaning, I am particularly influenced by the poetry of the ancient Haiku masters; Basho and Saigyo. The sparseness of their imagery highlights the very momentary, transient feeling of life. Basho describes Sabi as “the color of a poem”. Perhaps for my work, Sabi is like the sound of my painting. This synesthesia is the tone of a concept, the feeling of a place, the ability of people to empathize with their surroundings in a specific moment. The poet Charles Baudelaire[The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, transl. and ed. by Jonathan, Mayne (London: Phaidon, 1964), p. 116.] writes: "What would be truly surprising would be to find that sound could not suggest colour, that colours could not evoke the idea of a melody, and that sound and colour were unsuitable for the translation of ideas, seeing that things have always found their expression through a system of reciprocal analogy." Through this system of reciprocal analogy my paintings resonate with others. Just as emotions resonate in us as we listen to music, my colors, tones, and imagery sing about life and experience.
Brian Massumi uses the term virtual to discuss the real, but abstract. My work is aligned with this concept. I am interested in ideas of fields and of intensities, of emergence or becoming, of indistinction -- or in my paintings, of understanding distinction as an arbitrary cultural norm, not a definition or grasping of reality. My subversion of the densities of objects questions what we consider substantial. My use of natural patterning breaks object and image into fields of varying intensity, offering a different perspective on how we consider our surroundings as real, solid, graspable, namable and manipulate-able. What neuroscientist Dr. Ramachanrda terms “metaphorical thinking” in his work on artists and synesthesia, in my work functions in a virtual way to connect paint, tone, image, and layers into ideas surrounding our reality - life. My work is a different kind of landscape painting.
In a way, my paintings can be thought of like haiku poems. I apply a similar aesthetic sense, but in an American West Coast language, through my choice of non-specific subject matter that echoes a bereft aesthetic. I also find this through the process of editing superfluous objects, of paring the image down and leaving as much of my ground tone and non-depictive surface as possible. I let my ground act as ‘the color of my poem’, my mise-en-scene.
My paintings don’t have solid objects that sit in a less-important space that supports them. Sometimes the space is more active or more palpable than any object depicted. I play with density and translucency to question the conventional understanding held of our being ‘subjects that manipulate objects’. Offering a world that doesn’t recognize the substantial, or the ‘real’, I try and paint with this non-hierarchical idea in mind, although my paintings in no way try to illustrate this idea. I choose my subjects due to inherent rhythms or patterns I see in a place. The naturally occurring patterns I favor are another way of breaking down the hierarchy in our minds of object-priority. Functioning like visual white noise, it is this virtual patterning, this abstract found in the real and everyday, that simply calls out to be considered if we step out of a conventional way of seeing. My layers question hierarchical thinking, breaking apart the strata of so-called objects and space, giving each equal measure, an all-over feeling that challenges the assumptions in our perceptions.
