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 containment for a way of seeing. And I undertake art-making in these terms: as a builder, as a structure-maker, a ‘cultivator’ of visual spaces. My vocation is to transform mud and fibers into spaces: visual spaces, thought-spaces, dwelling-spaces—spaces for the housing of stories, the posing of questions, and the visual structuring of concepts. It’s not only that these paintings are often images of buildings, they are themselves ‘buildings’.
Yet, there is an impasse that occurs in these (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 allows us to enter, to investigate and consider—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 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:
Representation as 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 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. It is both a space in which to dwell and one that withholds itself. It is mud shaped to carry expansive meanings. And sustaining this tension is a means of speaking to broader tensions that we live with: tensions between hope and frustration, gratitude and longing, presence and transcendence.
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