Week Nine

The arrival of spring and a week of sunshine brought me gitty and eager to a research project on glass houses and the life support systems in the growing chambers of the greenhouse. The collections, the organizing, the nurturing, the controlled climate fascinate me as worlds in which surrogate conditions foster life and dependence. This is what I am playing with in the terrariums that stand as living experiments in my home and studio. I am encouraged to allow this fascination to be medium and subject. Landscape is not a thing but a construction and medium. Our fantasies and fears determine the shape. My fantasies a clearly embedded in this cycle of growth, reproduction, and decay as seen in the miniature worlds of the green house and the terrarium.

My painting became almost a grey ground for something else this week as if I was preparing for something big to come into my world. The layers of marks and washes from prior weeks that held explosions and springs of color and touch were built up only to be subverted and negated except for the hint of what had been surface last week. What this has done to the painting as a picture I can not decide, it both swims in a new subtlty and is swallowed in dullness depending on my oscillating opinion. This week also began a couple large pieces based on building up negative spaces in order to consider how the spaces in between become the subject and not the background similar to the way landscape becomes the subject when the buildings are grounds and non-buildings figure. I am interested in visual perception and how the eye clamors to make sense of our world by organizing positive and negative spaces.

If I think of landscape not as a thing but as a mode of inquiry, as an apparatus that is both a medium and a subject .... if I move away from the idea of landscape as an object being produced and towards a notion of landscape as a process of production which is at once boundless in its extent and also restricted by our sensorial limitations.... if I allow landscape to act not as a temporal continuum or a moment frozen in time but as place where time is layered and unorganized, where scale widens and shrinks, where thoughts pulse and light burns through opacity... if I think of no thing that can either represent nor act and that the scope of the land is fundamentally ideated then this is my art.