28 June 2006

So it Happens—

—the final portion of a painting completes itself: Motioning Between Sun and Moon.  For the longest time the project remained titled simply Motion, an explanation of the central figure's movement across is personal landscape, balanced between setting sun and crescent moon.  

I soon realized the one word does not adequately sum up the intended multiple levels of material supporting the painting's development.

One aspect of the the main character exists as a false echo of a 17th century poet, Andrew Marvel. Some of his pastoral poetry centers on a character in the midst of cutting back tall grasses, a mower. In my case, however, the harvester is not a scythe-wielding symbol for mortality, but rather a personal icon representing History—each individual leaf or cluster of leaves acts as a collection of years, strands of memories gathered up for storage, —or as a recording of events, details of time.

Physically the painting exists as a collection of individual panels, eighteen in all, summing up the unfolding scene. In turn each panel contains a word; as a group they all create a rhyming pattern of sounds: receive, besiege, succeed, proceed, breathe, conceive, concede, perceive, achieve, release, believe, bereave, recede, appease, relieve, deceive, retrieve, secede. Collectively, the words produce mere noise, a repetition of vowels, a flow of meaningless information, almost as if they were phrases spoken in another language.

In the beginning, the words were selected randomly and then paired with a painted cell. Ironically secondary meanings sometimes emerged, cementing a close relationship between verbiage and picture.

#5: breathe

This panel was the point of establishment, the preliminary image which spun out the remaining rectangles. Because of this in the framing process I added extra padding underneath the paper, to raise it slightly higher than the other images. As a result, the viewer's concentration is drawn to it's presence, emphasizing it's strategic importance. Likewise the scale of the flower displayed is composed larger than the other 17 panels, drawing the eye close to the opening blossom.

Composed mainly of abstracted shapes, the concentration of detail and brushstrokes rests on the blossom, the mouth gasping wide—as an act of breathing, a yawn opening the lungs to inhale.

One final emphasis: the image exists as the only panel paired with a single-syllable word.

#6: conceive

The crescent moon haunts my work, a personal cliche appearing in the background of illustrations and paintings as a half open cat's eye. Almost daily it manages to sneak into the house without warning, sit down on my couch, hovering over my sketches.

Ever since I read translations of the Norse mythologies, depicting the satellite as a male deity, the sphere transforms to male creative energy for me, rather than the Greco-Roman tradition of an elusive female personification.

I'd like to think even with the inclusion of a female empowered word "conceive," the moon here acts as a concept without restricting sexual identity. The conception of ideas, [rather than giving birth to another life] acts as an affirmation of the Yin-Yang / male-female concept, the duality inherent inside every object. The neuter "it" changing to a "he-she" instead, a partnership or exchange of roles between a twin brother and sister.

#16: deceive

In this case, the deception falls out of the fact the artistic creation exists as an act of deceit. After all, a painted image of a pipe is not a physical object that can be held in the hands, (Magreitte's: "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" — The Treachery of Images.)

So the left hand displayed on the page is not my left hand, but a depiction of my hand a false, crude copy of the physical reality.

The second point, the modern industry of the art world, in effect, is a deception of value to society— on one level, the public eventually accepts whatever is fed them as the lexicon of marketable, valuable merchandise. The function/decorative painting is replaced by a monetary investment.

Finally, the hand gestures towards the subject of the piece, offering up the project entire to the viewer as a staged, fictional portrait, or a recording of an event that never occurred.

The finished piece stands approximately 33" wide X 43" tall; each panel set slightly apart by 1/8" division, allowing shadows to fall just beneath the individual sections, depending on the light source.

Even now, with the framed piece on the wall, hanging under glass, there remains a compulsion to continue creating more panels, to increase the height and width of it's perspective until the landscape of the room disappears under the painting's growing horizon.

This compulsion translates to habitual action, to a painterly stream-of-consciousness: propel the moment of motion into an assembly line, the painted pages covering the visible landscape with a fictional dreamscape.

But I step back.      Breathe.      Motion to a newer project.

Metamorphosis
Transformation of an Idea

Slight changes developed with the Motion:2006 project. Additional panels appeared since last month— and I suddenly realized, three more images were necessary to convey the sense of action with the main figure—

The concept transfers to a sense of a stream of consciousness: the personality of the viewer as a river, complex, changing— just as time is fluid, non-static. After-all, the creation process itself acts as a multi-faceted event of conception, translation, revision.
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