What makes me paint? Wonder.
It’s what I do best---marvel at the way things are, how nature behaves, the outrageous playfulness of light and shadow, the astounding colors and movement that appear in the sky, on animal pelts, in the mind’s eye.
When we see something that inspires us, we draw in a sharp breath---inspiration means just that, after all---and the act that follows---painting in my case---is the ‘expression’, the exhalation. I’m surprised and amazed by everything all the time. Exhausting, of course, but it comes from wonder, and wondering about it all, and wanting to ‘make’ something with what I see. Not copying it, or recording it, or narrating anything, but seizing the part that causes my reaction, and making that part visible.
In a review for which I am endebted to the critic*, my works were called “grand painterly abstractions that use recognizable shapes to explore the notion of space and the phantasm of light.”
The ‘grand’ is appreciated, and “phantasm of light” is plain gorgeous, but sheer size is at work here, too. The size of my works---usually, though not always, quite large, from about 5 feet up to 14 or 15 feet---is because space, land, water, nature are all bigger than we are. When we step outdoors, we step into them, they envelop us: they are ‘grand’, as in grandeur.
My compositions travel across the canvas---starting elsewhere and continuing there, after passing through the canvas’ space. The shapes move over the surface of the piece driven by fast brushwork to give the painting sweep.
BOATS, BEASTS, BARNS, or other figurations are largely incidental in my work. That is to say, I work in series usually, so there are often many on one theme, but the ‘subject matter’ is nearly immaterial to me. It is there for formal reasons, the FORMS making it desirable for painting, because three-dimensionality, line, color, composition drawing with the brush---all essential components of my work---are all pretexts for painting, no more and no less.
I want to paint light and shadow and land and perspective, water and reflections, creatures with muscles and bones, because recognizable things create a clear sense of scale, because the shape of a boat is smooth and crisp and solid. Reflected in water, it has a double, a moving hallucination, vivid and unpredictable, shining in the water’s shifting plane.
A horse or a bull is vibrant with muscularity and hot life. And a barn is the same shape humans have been building for doghouses and cathedrals for 5,500 years and counting. There’s something there.
The geometry of perspective is a wonderful game played between the eye and the mind, where visual space is made to appear, and is evoked in the mind of the viewer. We take this for granted now, but there was a time, before perspective was explored in the 15th and 16th centuries, when paintings lived in flatness. While this was very beautiful and provided a spiritual space for saints and madonnas, it didn’t allow for free-wheeling flight into deep space, sometimes rather slightingly called “illusionist space”, where a Sistine ‘God’ can turn and fly straight away into the blue empyrean. Really cool, that, and a precious freedom in a painting…
But I’m a child of the mid-twentieth century, too, and came of age in the era of color field painting, when colored paint on a surface was a marvel to behold, and authenticity was in the paint. Paint is sticky colored stuff spread onto cloth on a wooden stretcher, and for me it must look and feel and read like paint, with substance, texture, physicality. Not photography or pixils.
So I paint objects with three dimensions, like boats and horses and barns, in order to ‘make’ light and shade, to play with the movement, the imaginary spaces, and the paint.
Perreault Magazine - 20 -
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