Portals of Discovery
Today we view landscape through layers: our immediate experience of the sublime is filtered through windows and lenses as we seek the postable digital image. My large-scale paintings investigate the changing, contemporary experience of the sublime.The geneses for the paintings are photographs taken with a phone camera through the window of a moving car, bus, or train.The imagery is familiar yet dislocating. Landscape is passing yet freezing in motion. Movement, light and reflection appear around transparent geometric forms that cut through the organic imagery. Abstracting the journey, allows for inward reflection while sifting through memories and personal histories, permitting a mental-shift to occur.
My work has always been landscape derived but never from a descriptive point of view. The paintings have been psychological, symbolic, and now a communication of a different visual experience. I deconstruct and reconstruct these visual experiences dissolving into multiple paint layers and mark making. I draw on the fluid abstraction of Pat Steir to render the movement of the journey. The images are not divorced from reality but not painted in reality. I use spray and acrylic paint to quickly build layers, switching to oil paint to build the final layers and translucent geometric forms. Turning the paintings, I work from two directions. The vertical drips give a sense of motion, blurring forms and while asserting surface flatness, they also build spaces. Though framing an experience of the sublime, the formal and expressive potential of paint is an essential aspect of my process and journey.