| BUENA VISTA BACKYARDS: A Vivid Darkness |
| This series of paintings is a personal investigation into the use of images of architecture as dramatic and psychological metaphor for contemporary societal experience. |
| Urban architecture, both secular and sacred, and the spaces they occupy, offer narrative and psychological insight into a community’s identity. The small factory town in southwestern Virginia, where I teach, has inspired a number of my paintings. To a visitor’s eye, the town looks like an ideal American city. One must spend time in the town to come to know the differences and tensions underlying every day life there. In the paintings the town looks somewhat like a stage set before, or after, the actor-inhabitants have appeared. The buildings are stripped of most architectural embellishments, though religious and secular buildings can be distinguished from each other. The effect is to call attention to the dynamics of relationship, to the psychological spacing between sacred and secular, front streets and back streets, and facades and alleys. I have also looked for similar relationships during my visits to Rome, Italy |
| The scenes in my paintings are a regard of the physical presence of the religious and secular institutions that command much of our communal life. The buildings, without detail and appearing as if prior to some action, seem to demand interpretation. Are the concepts underlying the architectural forms, vernacular and sophisticated, translatable into those underlying my paintings? What constitutes for them effectiveness? Success? What is the environment they seek to define? Most importantly for me, can painting broaden basic concepts of community? |
| FELLED BY BLISS: Anticipating Memory |
| In my painting of the land, I seek a universal connection, that is at times, visceral, and that is not effected by academic trends and art world posturing. I seek to create a visual metaphor for the experience of seeing and for the understanding the comes through that seeing of what it is that so profoundly – and at times – tenuously – resonates within us. |
| This experience evokes Gaston Bachelard's “intimacy in immensity”, discussed in his The Poetics of Space. What Bachelard presented was the concept that we can come to understand immensity – or in this case, vastness – by making it intimate. This external vastness, when made intimate – and this is a reversal of the experience – can become internalized and therefore understandable. So, how does one experience, or possibly come to understand, the immensity of, for example, the city of Rome or human history? |
| These paintings are an attempt to investigate the idea of painting a universal intimacy found in experiencing the poetics of the sky. Some people call them my “cloud paintings.” Yet, what I have come to understand about them is that they represent a universally shared feeling that we are all bound – united – under the immense stretch of sky. The more I paint them the more I see how these corporeal masses can represent a universal intimacy, a profound something shared by all. |
| Early on, the landmasses included were minimal, with the low horizon line sinking lower. Important in the process is the contrast between very thin and thick paint applications. The materiality of the paint gives meaning to the elusive nature of the moment. Like the clouds themselves, or a particular atmospheric effect, the unique moment of elements, is never to be repeated again. For me, that is the metaphor for human history. Additionally, this physicality of the medium validates – and becomes proof of – the artists' experience of the place and the process of creation. |
| Most recently the works have eliminated all reference to land. The sky stops and the land mass is missing. It is not just a painting of all sky. There is a void, an emptiness where the earth was. Historically all landscape paintings, in one way or another, refer, by nature, to a time or place. These works, by refusing to identify a place, by refusing to locate themselves, become universal. |
| In these paintings, the metaphors are realized not only narratively, but through a regard of light: how it unites objects while distinguishing them; how it accents, at one moment, the surface of things, their appearance and, at another, their mass, heft and character, how the moods it creates reach, in meaningfulness, almost to the level of the clearest, most literal and truest speech; how, finally it seems to engender the things it creates. Lately, I have come to think of light more and more in relation to its complement, darkness, shade. Through the relation of these two things, one grasps not only forms, but also space and time. The vividness of what is grasped invites contemplation of life’s energies and processes, of transformation and change, of presence and absence, of clear vision and uncertain memory. These last are, I believe, the themes of these simple images. I like to think that one senses, in the presence of their settings, the rustle of past experiences, of loss and gain, of hope. |