Please find clickable names of six other series to the left.


YOU ARE HERE SERIES

These would-be plein air studies are larger scale spray paintings (or, in one case, a subtractive "mopping" in tempera over alkyd) on masonite. I often use pegboard partly because its "port hole grid" seems to encourage mutually illusional, compositional, and poetic hunches that seem epistemologically evocative.

The analogically rife space between “window”-like [transparent-ad-transcendent] and “wall”-like [opaque-ad-immanent] seems important. How these aspects arise within a kind of responsive and heuristic improvisation - that is both quite subjective and objective - may be of broader interest.

Models from 18th and 19th century knowledge theory - for instance, notions of the Kantian epistemic grid and Hegelian/provisional "syntheses" - may be vaguely implied here.

As a simple example, 'grid' might be to the phenomenal as 'blurred distance' might be to the noumenal. In turn, these values might respectively correspond - among others - to thesis and antithesis (again, loosely along the lines of a kind of Hegelian dialectic). Of course, these are by no means the only historically recognized "perception dynamics" that such compositions engage, within reasonably inferential processes.

Approaching these objects variously and experimentally, the viewer may experience supposedly antinomial notions alternatively. As if disallowing an upper hand to either Heraclitus or Parmenides, say, vague notions of stability filter through those of dynamic adjustment and vice versa.

These natural atmospheres, typically wrought through sprayed 'atmospheres' of color, may lean toward consciously directed wonder and/or toward a kind of perceptual humility. Perhaps a 'reverence as reference' is additionally underscored along with structure's referential imperative (and reference's sensate-structural necessity).

Though by no means a yielding to nihilistic epistemics, the trapezoid-like shape and/or skewed perspective of several of these pictures implies a claim about how very few existential engagements are “frontal” or complete in their sense of a given Reality. I like to think that this contributes to expectation more so than to disappointment or frustration.

Pseudo-photographic, compromised focus (and/or “circles of confusion”) additionally recalls the supposedly negligible part of dramatically contrasting depth-of-field schemes. Such pictorial zones will have joined the general notion of background, possibly ultimately suggesting a divinity metaphor.

Rather than iconographic pointer or an oxymoronic, overstated sign — such areas may involve a necessarily complex if intimate sense of ultimate (and supremely relational if stubbornly mystifying) realities. Some of these pictures may locate and extend a place-like space in which, among other interlocuters, perception’s provisional confusion and reality's revelatory imperative co-mingle."

Particularly in more recent studies, I've reflected on pictorial scenarios like that where the engagement of earth and sky comes into a kind of perpendicular relation with that between land and sea, for instance. This “crossing” seems coincident with (and probably allegorical in relation to) other crossings. For instance, the crossing of image memory, whether of snapshots or great paintings, with memories of one's natural environmental experiences. Such perceptually saturated “memorial networks” also seem to intersect epic scale Memory (? perhaps Hebraic-Platonic “pre-lapsarian” notions, for instance).
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*As an aside only, I would vaguely relate image qualities here to the experience of the scriptural/gospel actor who, mid-way through the healing from blindness, remarked that people "appear as walking trees."

*The unfocused area by which depth-of-field contrast is maximized tends to foreground the supposedly negligible (that which perhaps garners contemplative care by refusing to demand attention). Again, low resolution images of the natural environment – in which we “live, move, and have our being” – may seem to metaphorize certain theistic senses and/or realities. They also seem to suggest a substantive cross-germination (though not confusion) of perception, contemplation, atmosphere, value, and substantive if largely tacit relationship.