Week Four

Where did the horizon go? I am a little disoriented, quite honestly, with my studio work. I destroy my painting to make something else that I don’t know. I am totally thrown back to myself to conjure something where I had been using the physical world as the origin of abstraction. I am not convinced. I know this deep winter period challenges my ability to think see horizons metaphorically. It is a period spent keeping warm, keeping spirits up and relishing in the smallest signs of spring coming.

There are some notions of spring in one of my pieces, the large canvas (60”x72”, detail above) was initiated with my mentor’s suggestion. The point is to negate a goal and ignore any meaning as I mark and register my days with layers. I actually love working larger. I feel much more physically connected to the process of applying paint and I feel looser. I feel winter and I feel spring coming.

I looked at Jacqueline Humphries this week. Jacqueline interested me first with a New Orleans installation done after Hurricane Katrina where she uses paintings and then areas of ‘non-painting’ to conjure ideas of displacement and absence. I am interested in the way she abstracts ideas and dismantles the conventional roles of paint, canvas and viewer. She does this with metallic paints and translucent canvases, with phosphorescence and black lights, with layers and tape to constrain the vigorous mark making.

I have an idea that resurfaced about the way in which insects see or sense a very difference spectrum of light than humans. What if we painting how a honeybee sees as it hones in on the nectar carrying flowers in the field? Would it look like a Vija Celmins constellation painting? Seeing seems to rule our culture and yet we don’t think about other ways of seeing very much. I will explore this more by considering abstractions of the environment that we are familiar that speaks to other ways of sensing. Do honeybees see a horizon or do they see the field? Is it space to navigate or is it a patterned plane to discern? Jacqueline’s work with vision and repositioning the viewer has influenced ways I think about my work both with painting and beyond.

I also looked at Mark Bradford this week. The abstract compositions of his installations seemed to grow out of his compulsive need to make, to erase, to layer, to scavenge, to restate, and to reinvent all within a vocabulary of everyday materials. His work is resourcefulness and demanding. I want to tap into this. I want to find ways to use the materials that are in my everyday and construe new configurations and combinations that are referent but also abstract. Can I do this? Another charge to try on for fit.

I still don’t know where the horizon has gone but maybe it is the thing that needs a new configuration. The painting to the right is an attempt to reassert it.

The honeybee needs only correct cues to find food and home, cues that are picked up by their sensitive sensory mechanisms. Humans need what at this point? Maybe it is a new position in the environment.

More works in progress.. see side bar right.

Art Journal

Jacqueline Humphries

http://jacquelinehumphries.net/

http://bombsite.com/issues/107/articles/3262

Jacqueline Humphries, Kerber (December 15, 2001)

“Jacqueline Humphries: Greene Naftali Gallery” by Johanna Burton (Art Forum 2007)

Mark Bradford

http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/bradford/

http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/mark_bradford.htm

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08nwTyfjCrw

Street Level: Mark Bradford, William Cordova & Robin Rhode, Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University (April 30, 2007)