I have been surrounded by a sense of living history through art. Art and the active craft of art is as much a part of myself as breathing. For the past six years, it has been my passion to paint. I have engaged in painting on my own terms, approaching the malleable liquid and grit of paint in ways that are quite different from the works in the wide ranging collection of art I mentioned in the poem introducing my blog.
Standing alone in my work space, I have felt at times that paint can become the color of the human soul. My private paintings began in a solitary room, but these works have managed to come to notice, one of which was added to the Presidential Collection at the White House. Encouraged, I was accepted to Yale University where I pursued formal studies in painting at the Yale School of Art, along with independent art studies at the
Whitney Museum in New York.
In deciding what to select from the wide-ranging art collection highlighted in ABOUT THIS BLOG, I’ve thought deeply about what is most personal to me. I’d like to open a post on what I’ve created, with a private journal entry on the subject of
Paintings of My Own Vintage. The paintings imaged on this site that intersect the above
Trifecta of posts are murals that are part of a
larger collection. In time, I would like to reflect upon the profound beauty of other artist’s works within my care and keeping, but for now, I feel closest to the murals that have been generated from my own hands. These installations are my passion, since I feel driven to complete the cycle of my present work.
REFLECTIONS ON PAINTING AND LIGHT
Light is a door. The open ceiling well of an art studio sky-light is not just an aperture of luminosity but a deep energetic connection that permits an artist to see into emotion, into love, and into places that become expressed from deep within one’s being. The casual onlooker might simply acknowledge that visible light is optical illumination, but as a form of energy, from my own experience, I believe the quality of light falling on one’s work and the artist’s perception of light has the power to shape artistic direction. The murals I paint are complex webs that mark the moments I have lived working in lighted spaces. Their innumerable networks of markings sign a private language best left to the translation of viewers coming into an illuminated gallery space.
My interaction with painting became came clear to me in the second floor art studios of the Yale School of Art. I remember how my paint brush dripped with red paint and how the tip suddenly shone bright in a beam of light that was bouncing through the art room windows facing Chapel Street. The light was streaking off the windshield of a slowly passing car onto my canvas like a refracted laser. In those moments, paint was no longer paint, but the blood of lighted and living substance. In those moments, I wanted to more fully explore the chemistry of color, to get beneath the mystery of color. Art in those moments was an epiphany that came closest to enlightenment.
From that moment, I embarked on researching hand-ground pigments that had been formulated since antiquity. I located two natural gemstone paint sources in India that purvey natural minerals that would form the basis of paint I would make for specialized passages of my work. Utilizing these resources, I began to grind my own pigments in a mortar. I toted my bag to London. I located binding mediums to make paint from
L.Cornelissen & Son, an art supply house near the British Museum.
I became particularly sensitive about the condition of my canvases before beginning work. White or light backgrounds have been important to artists ever since the early cave paintings on light colored stone at
Lascaux, and continue to provide painters working with traditional media the equivalent of radiant light filled windows. A brilliant and bleached artist’s ground has the power to ignite the picture plane with light. When an artist touches his blank canvas, his hand touches not just flat white, but a field of possibility for light and inspiration. The inculcation of light that infuses F.R. Church’s glowing work, is replete not just with the illusion of light, but the artist’s conception and interpretation of abstract shapes of light. Indeed, the brilliant areas on the picture plane create a dramatic visual pattern. Church’s work remains as much a portrait of the outer world as an inner world of light devised of his own thinking and desire for luminosity.
Pursing my own desire to impart radiance, I became intrigued as to how thirteenth century stained-glass artists achieved their peculiar sacramental ruby panes in the
Sainte-Chapelle. The exquisite cobalt blue glass from this time period remains a marvel.
I found that compounding color and judging its interaction with light across various radiant sources engaged a transformational study. Computer monitors are our present-day sun behind all graphics on the web. Indeed, our visual perception of art has changed via our tech medium that has transformed all images to uncalibrated virtual stained-glass.
When I step away from the virtual world, when I stand in front of my installations, their pearl powder-coated handmade canvases serve as the light behind the paint. The antique
Fedoskino Russian painting technique that adorns luster of mother-of-pearl imparts a visual electrical sheen to paint and functions internally within my painting like the light of a screen–saver. The graphic of my mural,
Shalom: Stars of David on a Sapphire Field, that was added to the collection of the
National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia, utilizes an archival clay paper that was coated with nacre and encaustic, enriching the effect of ink deposited from my Epson 4800 series graphic printer.
Standing in the studio in a wash of light, one realizes that illumination is not just an optical quantity or a technique of craft, but a motion of spirit that connects the artist and the viewer to the roots of creative energy. Every brush stroke of a painting imparts energy in discrete bursts of an application that remains in place as an expression of combustion. Whenever our eyes contemplate an original work of painting, absorbing the color and lines of an artist’s signature, no matter how smooth the surface, we link to that energy. We join a river of connection. For some standing in this sacred sphere in a museum, in experiencing admiration for the work of an artist long passed, that connection might best be described as a state of light.
On a walk around Yale and the environs of New Haven, I noted that many of the buildings were marked with dedicatory engravings, some of which were placed above stairwells, above colonnaded arches, and on the lintels and architraves of entrances. I encountered an engraved block of sandstone mortared into the wall of a building. Running my hand over the grooves of its lines, the words spoke to me, and I felt the living light of its authorship:
ARS PERENNIS/IN LUCE VIVE, VIVE IN AMORE
Art is eternal - live in light, live in love.♦
