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Art Talk
I suppose I have always
felt that if an artist has to talk about
his work, he's not doing his job. That said...
In the past I have somewhat jokingly referred
to my work as neo-luminism. Recently I have been
revisting that term. I would like to make it
stick.
Luminism in the 19th century had at its core
the idea of the landscape imbued with light;
the spiritual. It often made an attempt to
place man within the landscpe, sometimes in
a self conscious and ham-fisted way (for example,
with a couple tiny figures sitting in the corner
of a a spectacular scene, smoking a pipe).
It's as if by placing the people there, the
artist was reassuring the viewer that, yes,
it's wild, but we have things under control...see,
here are some PEOPLE!In calling up the term
neo-luminism I am acknowledging my debt to
my predecessors of the 19th century; acknowledging
the draw of the spirit on man within the landscape.
But I ask for the presence of man to be implicit
with the presence of the viewer.We have gone
to all the wild places, and have "tamed" them.
Our judeo-christian heritage, with its insistence
on our placement at the top of the ladder of
evolution has allowed us to think ourselves
as separate from nature.I suggest that we are
in the process of growing up in terms of our
relationship with our environment. We have
come to a new sense of our connectedness. That
connectedness is directly related to our ability
to outgrow this notion of "separateness" from
nature.
Much of my work eschews spectacular scenery.
It doesn't make constant reference to man and
his works. It is about finding the spiritual
in the distillation of simple, unspectacular
scenes. Put simply: what you see and feel here
is what you get. And if what you get is a yearning
for a deeper connection with nature and spirit,
then you share with me the thing that keeps
me painting. |
