Flat Aerials

I've had a flu/cold for the last two weeks and haven't been able to spend much time in the studio. All I've been able to muster the energy for is my work at the museum and a couple of hours here and there before and after the museum work. Mostly, I've been working at home on some smaller pieces and sorting out what's left of my home studio.

Today I moved several things that had been piling up at home to the downtown studio, worked for a few hours there and took the photos below. They're a couple of the painted aerials I moved today. I started these in the fall of 2005 right after we moved to Knoxville from Los Angeles. That these were the first new pieces I started within a couple of months of moving to the new location is personally significant considering their pastoral, even agricultural, quality. At this point, they're still works-in-progress.

Note:I filled the unpainted parts digitally with pale blue to experiment with alternatives to the white of the unpainted gesso.


Random Aerial #3 (vertical pastoral sketch) and Random Aerial #4 (horizontal pastoral sketch)

These paintings explore my relationship to sites of city and country and to a "naturalized" view of the human imprint on the landscape. As most of my other work, these pieces play with ways of knowing a landscape: either through a sequenced / time-based relationship (as in walking, one foot / image in front of the other) or a spatial, holistic and mapped view. These pieces would be the mapped view. All this is nuanced by my personal experience of moving back to Appalachia from Los Angeles and the loss of the imagined relationship to "the country" from afar.

These aren't paintings in the usual sense as I used processes more akin to fiber dyeing than to mark-making or brush-work. First, I allowed the paint to move about on the panel in response to my controlled motions (similar to what I'd discovered earlier with dyeing and staining raw canvases). With this process, images emerge that are simultaneously random and patterned as with other dendritic forms. Upon seeing such forms emerge, the process made it easy for me to imagine I was as much a force of nature governed by physical parameters as a collection of trees, a leaf or a city like Los Angeles. My movements and thoughts constructed the same forms as a branching tree, a forking river, a vine of ivy, a clump of blood vessels, an interstate freeway system or a cancer.

Second in the process, I deliberately filled-in the spaces created between the randomness. This part of the process was very deliberate and opened the work up to choice, patterns and a different form of repetition.

I found the relationship between the precision and the fluidity to be meaningful during that time of transition. In fact, I find this work to be very personal as it reveals my thought processes and struggles at a time when I was trying to re-situate myself in a location that (in nostalgic recollection) I had believed to be familiar and, yet, was so utterly different than the city which I'd become accustomed and whose streets and freeways I knew so intimately.