Work in Progress

At this moment in time, May of 2009, my work in progress is minimal. I am mulling over a reworking of the painting below, The Amargosa Playa 2 (Oil on canvas, about 36 x 38) that I did at the end of the residency at the Goldwell Open Air Art Museum.

I am thinking about ways of seeing, having recently read, among other things, William L. Fox's The Void, the Grid and the Sign, in which he talks about questions of making art out of voids like the Amargosa Plain. That place, the Amargosa Valley (or Plain or Playa) was my constant companion for six weeks and I'm still working out its impact on how I see. The expansion of space that is the desert has few forms and no middle ground, yet it has quantities of ever-changing light and movement and variation.

I hope to be using some of the ideas that I worked out in Montana, in the final Back Wall work, Basin in Winter. There the central image was a personal map of the space I had felt while I was in residence at the Montana Artists' Refuge in December 2008 and January 2009. The map was surrounded by two "obos" -- cairns of stone that say simply "I was here." Above and below the central map are paintings of specific scenes from the Basin experience.

I also read an essay by Lawrence Wechsler in the Spring 2009 Virginia Quarterly Review, "Double Vision: the Art of Trevor and Ryan Oakes" which continues my mental exploration of how we really see as opposed to how we are taught to see. Our brain teaches us to see that which will enable us to be most efficient in our manuverings through the world, and now the ubiquitous camera tells us that the efficient manuvering mode is the "real" way the world looks. But along with David Hockney, Rackstraw Downes and others, Fox and the Oakes twins are teaching us that our brain dummies down our visual perceptions. There may be more to the world than our eyes seem to be telling us.