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I still find Romanticism compelling, though we live in a decidedly un-Romantic time. This, in large part, explains the unusual way that I create landscapes--by repainting photocopies, even photocopies of photocopies. I like the irony of painting trees using photocopies, referring to that life-less process even as I create a sense of light and time. My images reflect dual interests in photography and painting. At times, they are revelations of emotional states. More frequently, they are the result of deliberations regarding the endeavor of painting itself�painting in the age of mechanical reproduction.
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even now, mm/canvas, 16" x 20"
Throughout art and literature, the wilderness has functioned as a liminal space�an �in-between� place. It is a site for transformation, for reversal. It may be presented in terms of infinite expanse or of confinement.
Art itself is a liminal space. It may be a site for investigation of one�s self�of the interior. Neither is it always a safe, predictable place. I have taken the subject of the forest as my own. These scenes are less representations of actual places than they are of experiences.
Christians, particularly, frame their experience in liminal terms of �already/not yet�. Upon confession of faith, believers may understand themselves to be citizens of heaven, though remaining bodily on earth for a time.Christian experience is itself inherently liminal.
I intend these images to capture some sense of this experience, just as earlier American landscape artists meant to encode their faith. The significance that I import into these landscapes is not so much a depiction of particular place as particular experience. The freedom that I experience is not separate from the sense of containment in that landscape. For me, this is what it is to be �in between�.
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The photograph is the basis for these images; it reflects a conceptual, as well as a physical distance from the subject matter, as we tend to experience the outdoors vicariously through the filter of media. Derived from photographs of trees, found in publication, and digitally manipulated, I enlarge these images emphasizing the dot-matrix. This is the basis for the final painting; the photographic image is repainted. The pixel dictates the brush mark; the color and light are invented. In keeping with these tensions, I investigate cool/warm, high key/low key contrasts. The result is that the final image is partially photographic, partially hand-rendered, and almost always pixilated--the photograph is translated into paint. The hand of the artist is subject to the mechanics of the photographic process.
valley of (re)vision, mm/panel 14" x 20"
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