The mystery of art and literature – that sounds and paint and words on a page are vehicles by which we gain access to what we perforce acknowledge as profound truth – is a fact of great significance… That a temporal succession of vibrations in the air can speak to us of eternity is a fact that must be accommodated in any adequate account of reality.
-John Polkinghorne
I think about painting in construction terms. Paintings are ‘buildings’; they are structures that are designed to provide support and containment for ways of seeing and thinking. The construction of a painting—particularly a representational painting—is the process of reconfiguring mud (oil) and fibers (canvas) into spaces: visual spaces, thought-spaces—spaces for the housing of stories, the sheltering of questions, and the visual structuring of concepts. In this way, paintings provide a distinct kind of space for human dwelling. It’s not only that the paintings in this series are images of buildings, they are themselves ‘buildings’.
Yet, there is an impasse that occurs in these paintings and, ultimately, all representations. The construction of visual space has a dual action to it—as do all buildings. The same structure that allows for containment—it affords us a space to enter, investigate, and temporarily indwell—is also an obstruction. The painting draws us into a space, but it is also the painting that barricades us out of that space. And it is the paint itself that serves both functions. As someone trained in the realist traditions, I am capable of transforming paint into light and space; but at the same time, it never ceases to be paint—it is always mud on woven canvas.
This dynamic, this impasse, is what I am interested in this series of paintings. And over the past couple years, this has taken at least three different forms:
Representational barricade: In these paintings (which includes Celestial, Foundation, etc.) the representational space of the painting simultaneously opens up to us and seems to withhold itself from us. There are represented objects, such as gates or caution tape, blocking our way or giving us no route to further access the space.
Brushstroke as barricade: After realizing that the paint itself provides its own barricading function, I began to experiment with what appears to be representational spaces that have been obscured by brushstrokes put over them (Ways and Means, Contraction, etc.) . In actuality, the gestural 'blotch' brushstrokes are put down first and then a representational space is painted around them. This is significant, because it means that the painting has only one layer of paint. We naturally see the brushstrokes as an obstruction; we naturally proceed into the space of images. But, in reality, the obstruction is built into the painting from the beginning: the entire surface of the painting is covered with brushstrokes.
Repetition as barricade: If the paint itself has the dual activity of both opening space and obstructing it, then I started to question whether repeating the image would most forcefully highlight both functions (Curtains, Protraction, etc.). In each of these paintings, I have built an image, articulated a space, and then tried to repeat it, to ‘speak’ it again. Because there are multiples of each image, the viewer cannot comfortably reside in a singular space but, instead, has to negotiate the fact that it is both a deep visual space and a flat painted surface.
Rather than offering conclusions, I’m interested in sitting with this tension: a painting is both a window and a wall. A painting is somehow able to speak of things other than itself, while remaining persistently only the thing itself. There is a real presence toward which each painting points, and yet this presence is simultaneously sustained and withheld by the real presence of the painting itself. And, ultimately, my explorations of this tension in visual language run analogous to (and thus perhaps serve as models of) tensions that reside throughout human language. Human meaning is everywhere saturated by the profound mystery that existence is indeed ‘sayable’, and yet always haunted by deferral, resistence, and our own convoluted ability to accomplish such a ‘saying’. I consider this tension to be rich and significant.
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