NOTE: The writings that I’ve placed under many of the paintings are incomplete sketches or evolving ideas that I’ve posted here to help explain the pictures and what they mean to me. They are also here as notes, or reminders to myself of issues I’d like to explore further.
Here he is settling another world, all his accoutrements hanging and waving or strapped down. Half man, half beast, Cyborg, Centaurus, Ixion's creation. Looking back into that bright glare, a new world has come. Or rather he has come looking, staking his claim.
The Aeneid traces the origin of Rome. Like Aeneas, this settler ranges, has its history, its appetites and its duty. Actually, after discovering Ixion in Tartarus I got carried away thinking about the race of Centaurs, wondering what ancient impulse conceived these half-man half-beast formations. Suddenly the Cyborg felt a very old concept to me. In any case this creature above does appear to be half horse, yet it may very well be a robotic horse. He is ready to pollinate the new world and spread his likeness throughout the heavens.
I often find myself impatiently daydreaming or skim-thinking more like it, about the next generation of settlers, about those space miners, who'll be calling some extraterrestrial soil home, donning a spacesuit and going about mundane daily activities on distant planets. But it all kind of seems like nonsense to me now, unnatural, inefficient to leave this planet. It's like trying to crawl out of your body.
The Universe is expanding, breathing out, galaxies moving away from each other at the speed of light, and faster. The spectral lines of elements emitted from the stars reveal a shift toward the red end of the spectrum, this shift is an expression of motion, an outward motion.
Photons are emitted from energetic electrons, the photons that reach us from the sun light up nearly all of what we see outside, even at night most of the natural light is reflected off the moon. Those photons that do reach us from the stars and those distant expanding galaxies are coded history though. So much can be learned from these tiny packets of information.
My paintings absorb some photons and repel others, I control these interactions by applying various elements to the surface of the canvas. When I want to see red I simply apply a type of cadmium that refuses to absorb red photons and they bounce back into my eye.
If the central form of my painting above somehow became animate and began to
race away, the light reflecting off it would stretch out and lose energy, it
would take on a reddish hue. If it started toward me, the light would take on
a bluish hue.
When two objects speed together, the wavelengths of their reflecting colors contract and experience an increase in frequency and energy; as they speed apart the wavelengths become elongated and dissipate in frequency and energy.
Newton used to stare at the sun. Euclid and Ptolemy thought the eyes emitted rays that, when combined with those of the sun, could illuminate objects. Others thought that objects disturbed the air, and that the eye, being mostly water, picked up on these disturbances and transmitted them to the brain. Now we think of everything around us as being illuminated by electromagnetic energy from the sun: Photons that have just travelled millions of miles through space and several minutes through time, finally (and nearly instantaneously) touching everything we see before dancing into the greedy little receptor cells at the back of our eyes, which are actually only responsive to a very small bandwidth of electromagnetic radiation.
Light is untethered in space and time. Photons with frequencies, outside of time. No mass. Light describes curved space when it travels in a straight line. It travels billions of years through time without aging.
It takes energy to move through
space. It takes energy to exist in space. Nuclear forces combine with electromagnetic
forces to hold our bodies together. As these fields of energy move through space
they divert energy from time. A causal relationship exists between motion and
time. I can't move without time, this I know. But can I pass through time without
movement? Our galaxy is careening through space at about a million miles an hour.
If it were to stop would we find ourselves then careening through time? Can you
ever stop moving?
The painting above has become unstuck in both space and time. It began by moving so fast through space that it stopped moving through time, and subsequently stopped so utterly still that it catapulted through time. It now exists in both the future and the past.
I've added a two-headed serpent looking backward in the painting, casting light that will be seen as red shifted to the observers it leaves behind (yellow here in its inertial frame of reference). Above it a red shifted lightray comes into the frame.
The skull emits a beam of light, it's looking for memories, history, knowledge. Shards of bone, grown in a twisted fashion glow. Inner workings are arranged with Baroque flourish, a codpiece is worn. That nonblinking eye has fixed its gaze forward. Moving madly through time there's no way back. The cockpit is dark.
I almost always come back to physical analogies when thinking of my paintings or explaining them to myself. There are some very general, limited ways of talking about pictures (the reasons for making them in the first place is to demonstrate something that cannot really be conveyed any other way).
The dialogue can take the form of a narrative which may touch on different aspects of survival or it can move directly into an expression of the body; sensuality, movement, eating, etc. An analogous interpretation may examine and refer to the nature of nature, embracing the sciences and exploring the relatedness of things; whether this take the form of impressions, i.e. beauty vs ugliness or measuring similarities and differences: eye-spots in unicellular organisms, the eyes in mammels and photosynthesis in plants. Mannerisms; noticing and classifying the very subtle differences between nearly identical objects.
All of these interpretative tools reveal the shade and structure of the being imagining them. I have two eyes so I see and therefore think in perspective; half of my body mirrors the other half, merging in the middle. My thoughts are shaped by the world my body inhabits.
A fundamental requirement of life is the consumption of living tissue (or tissue that was once living) for nourishment.
The unwitting instruments of some grand energy conveyance, we come together, feed, split, grow, “evolve,” die.
Each organism begins within, and is formed of, the world it will inhabit. Colonies of cells created from proteins, enzymes, the alpha carbon. Atoms clicking together to form molecules, which in turn grow together into an endless array of patterns and functions.
We are a sea of tissue, held together by living bonds, subordinated by the breaking of those bonds, and the slow (or quick) spilling of our life's blood back into the earth; feeding the multitude of living organisms following behind us, around us.
The living follow a hierarchical, self-interested, species- or same- centric survival system motivated by self-preservation. Our emotions, desires and identities expand outward from this fundamental point.
In art, the thrill of conquest and the reward of the feast have taken on many historical and allegorical adaptations. The debasement or transcendence of the “other” is sublimated in courtship, politics, religion, business and warfare.
To acknowledge something as “other” and then ascribe it to be “evil,” “beast,” or “savage” certainly helps the whole killing/consumption/conveyance process along. It would be difficult to eat a pig if we thought about its very definite preference for life or imagined it sick with fear just before it was to be slaughtered. Likewise, human tribes have tried throughout history to see ethnic and/or religious (intellectual) distinctions between them as confirmation that one or the other was better suited for brutality and subordination.
But the “other” is fundamental to life. If all life-forms don't share the ability to determine a distinction between self and other, they all share the definition of a physical boundary. The boundaries of its body are an organism's first territorial responsibility. Keeping them intact is what keeps it plugged into the world.
Life's boundary, then, is death, or literally, non-life. In the larger, timeless, formless unsheathing of one organism into another through division, offspring, and evolutionary transformation over a massive expanse of time, life can be seen as a kind of kinetic struggle against entropy. From this perspective there has been no death here for nearly 4 billion years. Life could be called All-life which is fed by the nuclear fusion of the sun.
Finally, the sun consumes itself:
The Sun, an explosion of hydrogen into helium sparked by gravity pulling against the mass of a once giant gas cloud, is seeking equilibrium. The fiery mass is in a state of collapse, crushing in on itself, its hydrogen atoms fusing into helium, a dense core forming. The mass lost in the creation of helium explodes outward as heat and light, holding up the Sun and feeding the Earth. The more the Sun burns through its hydrogen the denser and hotter its core becomes. Next, it consumes its helium atoms, fusing them into carbon, it's hotter now and the Sun swells. The raging giant engulfs the Earth then falters. The carbon is too dense to ignite and the reaction is slowed. There's a final sputter as its fiery, gaseous coat is thrown off. The hard, dense core will now cool and shrink until it reaches a final cold equilibrium. The conveyance is through.
Theoretically, it is possible to survive in the cold, black vacuum of space for about a minute.
The delicately balanced bladder of atmosphere that encircles the Earth is so tenuous. Without atmospheric pressure, the boiling point of liquids drops. Without the weight of all that moist gas bearing down on us we would come “unglued,” our body fluids would start to boil; the molecules, needing less energy to break free of their liquid state, would begin jumping ship.
The escaping vapor would instantly freeze on any part of you that lay in shadow from the Sun, (the last ball of light and heat for 25 million, million miles). But, for about a minute, survival is possible and your eyes would not pop out of your head nor would your heart explode.
Extreme environments that define the limits of our adaptive abilities also show us just how narrowly focused and precarious living organisms are. The limititations of our physical nature set the parameters for the physical world we contemplate.
Natural laws form the basis of painting; whether one is adhering to their logical relationships or poking fun at them with incongruous juxtapositions, the physical world has everything to do with picture making.
My understanding of how forms behave in space allows me to create my abstractions and play with their positioning from multitudinous perspectives. This interplay is engaging to me precisely because of my “hard-wired” cognition of the physical properties of weight, surface tension, solid, sharp, falling etc. These conditions are the manifestations of the properties and laws of the material world we all inhabit. By reproducing them in a painting, I am contemplating the laws of the material world.
Mathematical reasoning, statistics, metaphysics, evolution, logic, are all concepts that found popular expression during the 19th century and provide an engaging backdrop for me.
Living in a time when the focus of any one field has become so narrow and discreet that it almost acts as a separate and complete system of logic in itself, I often ignore my own innate abilities of contemplation, relying instead on snippets of Google-able “truths” to form the basis of my thought.
Chauncey Wright, a mathematically gifted thinker active from the 1850s–70s, put together an understanding of the universe by making comparisons to the weather. His “cosmical weather” is remarkable not just because it resembles more contemporary ideas about the universe’s origin like the Big Bang, but because he's taken something as accessible and mundane as the weather to help him structure the logic of his theory via analogy, extrapolation and most of all, just plain old daily experience. He didn't need to be a meteorologist to think about the weather.
When I was looking through the different stages in the development of this painting, I thought it rather interesting how it mimicked the picture I have in my head of the way, say the Earth, was formed: A big fiery mass slowly cooling and developing distinctions, temperatures fluctuate — allowing for variant surfaces, metals coagulate and so on.
This painting is done in homage to those who think first and ask questions later.