 |
In my work this year, I have become increasingly interested in the area outside our field of representation. |
In
my work this year, I have become increasingly interested in the area
outside our field of representation. I want to gesture towards things
that have no objective shape: feelings and memories on the edge of our
language, both verbal and pictorial.
I
don’t know why I am constantly drawn into this arena, this wordless
place. How do we point to those ephemera? What can I say, or would
want to? I know only that I am drawn constantly to this challenge by a
recurring feeling of poignancy, which I feel in my everyday life, and
which I want to replicate and express to others. For somehow it must
be a key to our shared experience with life, the beauty made tragic by
our keen awareness that everything, including our very selves, is
impermanent.
Thus,
I work to present this feeling to others. In general, this array of
feelings includes poignant and melancholy feelings about our passing
through life, the stamp we make reaching out into the world. The
shared human desires for love, comfort, freedom from pain and fear.
These feelings are universal, and while they are often evoked in
narrative scenes, they are essentially intangible. I try to approach
them directly, without the vessel of presentation or metaphor; but to
explore their manifestation directly on the canvas.
In
addition to approaching these feelings I want to use a visual language
that is emotional, not intellectual. To this end I employ the mark and
line which reveal my “hand”, in a physical attempt to touch my viewer.
Color is of course a tool of the emotions as well, and I have certain
colors, in the outside world and in my mind which are especially
emotionally resonant. As well, the use of line, twisting and
meandering as its own entity, a small voice heard. Line is even more
spontaneous than mark; it is action made manifest, preserved. I think
of them as my trilogy: the atmosphere and harmony of color, the power
and expression of mark, and the present-ness and spontaneity of line.
I
have come to believe in the power of the mark as a direct utterance.
Form is often narrative, evoking shapes of the outside world. But the
mark seems to me to retain its clear ringing expression.
I
see the mark as a physical event, one body contacting another, perhaps
arbitrarily or intuitively. Yet the idea of the mark as caused by
something else- the arbitrary bump of life’s events- reveals it to be
an instrument of life, of intuitive communication. As opposed to
representation form, which employ recognizable shapes in a narrative.
Or to abstract form, which approaches the canvas through formal
qualities, the mark is human, intuitive, unfettered by an official
purpose. And yet, in the lack of a purpose, the mark can be imbued
with such emotion and physical presence, such that it communicates
powerfully and directly the presence and intention of the artist.
How
can there be a connection between the hand, brushing on the page, and
the genuine heart of sadness? Yet the relationship seems ordained,
primal, innate. The movement of the brush, the mark, the line
expresses the deepest human utterance. Roland Barthes writes: “There
is a kind of sign, entirely without abrasion or lesion, that I would
hazard to call “sublime.” The instrument that makes its trace (a pen
or a pencil) descends toward a sheet of paper and simply lands upon it,
that’s all. It doesn’t even hint at biting in, it simply comes to
rest. The almost oriental rarefaction of the slightly smudged surface
(that is the object) is responded to by the extenuation of the
movement. It grasps nothing, it finds its poise, and everything has
been said."
In my explorations this year, the question has ceased to be ‘what to paint’ and is now “how to paint”. I will continue working with the trilogy, unearthing the clearest utterance I can, and bringing it to land on the surface of the canvas, in one moment of infinite emotion.
