Black Water Reflections
Friday, November 5, 2010
Black Water Reflections
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All the time Wendy n I spent ‘meditating’ (would cover it as a term)
sitting by the waters edge, just losing our edges, becoming one with
where we were, those realized moments, form the basis of all our
water paintings.
The realization that the true beauty of the place, of the moment,
as well as being, for us, one and the same, is that life just goes
on independent of whether we acknowledge it or not, independent
of us although we are welcome to join in.
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There is a natural elegance both to and in the world. my paintings
are meditations on that elegance; they all contain the divine spark
of originality.
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Any questions of originality are they a multi faceted function of
seeing developed over time or can they be a direct expression of
how one is wired up one of course one realizes how one is wired
up. My wiring, well lets not go there…..
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I have come to understand my use of ‘meditative’ with respect to
landscapes, as our underlying commitment to nature through
painting, is all about light and water, neither of which can be
painted directly. Treating light as pure source, the paintings are
an expression /realization of its effects’ water being transparent,
always different, lets us explore /express its infinite appearance
through the very reflections that try to confine it.
Water is a perfect source of abstraction, transparent; we paint
the reflected sky above, the bottom revealed by passing clouds,
the edges contained by forests all around all sides.
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What you get from us, what we paint is not so much something
beautiful, more on that later, as a place to stand to be to see from,
a place in which and from which to both lose and realize oneself
in the world…..
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There is a grittyness in anything I find/call beautiful.
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What I have always found and understood to be beautiful, has
come when I am able to lose myself, become one with where I
am; there is a completeness, then; everything is simple and
everything is complicated at the same time, my paintings have
an overall simplicity or directness to them yet are made up of
all the complicated stuff that is that simplicity.
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What is beautiful in/about a painting; possible levels of
discussion are as many as there are individuals; as the saying
goes, the world is divided in to those who think they are right.
While I draw upon my natural ability / sense of design and
balance, what Wendy and I think of as beautiful in the work
is the expression /realization of the life going on around us.
As we just sit there, and the world opens up to us, almost all
of it is worth expressing through paint, if only I had unlimited
abilities. In working the Canadian landscape we have found
that it really has nothing to do with how far north one goes,
rather with being able to see n feel ‘the wild’ of the place
one is in at any given moment.
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The ideas I paint are simple, direct, immediate, everything
but obvious, breaking things down to the level of simple
only places me at the threshold of possibility of seeing the
obvious, of seeing what there is to be seen, to seeing
something as it is….and even then I cannot escape myself
and my particular way of seeing which then become the
paintings themselves…which is why in the end, the
paintings speak for themselves, have to stand on the strength
of the idea and how it is presented. I certainly am not selling
the paintings on the strength of my name. not yet anyways.
All the work taken together, offers up a unique dialogue
on the Canadian landscape.
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A lot of things never occur to me at the time I am doing
something. I lose myself in an idea and afterwards need
the space of time to breathe emotionally distancing myself
from it before I can talk / think about the processes,
(without ever telling anyone how /what to see in my work)
possibilities and unique journey in spiritual understandings
of our world through paint; in the end I am not interested in
explaining in/with any greater detail any of the processes,
the experience is all I am after, all I walk away with anyways…
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I title everything, but the titles are not to be confused with
explanations of anything. The paintings in so far they refer
to actual places, speak of moments when and where I
managed to get away from myself / to lose me edges /
become one with where I was; Any detail in the work covers
the distances to which I was able to lose myself before
returning to the prescribed boredom and pointlessness
of every day.
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There are no truths; how deep is a reflection.
merely things we agree to see
In a particular way
until…. a new way…..comes along
I don’t know leaves
I don’t know anything of the world
outside myself
I don’t know the leaves
floating on the pond
I only know we have agreed to call
those shapes
floating on the pond,
leaves.