2011
TAR PAINTINGS
As an artist that is always on the hunt for new painting materials, it was the gooey messiness of tar that first trapped my attention. The pleasure of probing an oozing puddle of tar with a stick and pulling out runnels of shiny black strands is no doubt an ancient experience shared by early humans. This primal quality of ‘playing’ with tar lead me to think about the meaning of making contemporary art with a primordial goo.
In the Miocene Age, microorganisms lived and died in ancient seas. Sediments formed as their bodies settled into the seafloor and over eons became deposits of oil and tar. Tar is then evidence of a geological timescale and of the evolutionary processes of our planet. Now, as I paint images of contemporary nature in a medium such as tar, the image is re-framed with an awareness of this moment’s ancient provenance. It underscores its place in time. The ‘painted moment’ can be seen as a brief segment in a vas fluid process we call Nature.
The contemporary human use of tar as a source of petrochemical fuels also brings additional meanings to my work. Tar colors my paintings with smoggy sepia browns and erosive textures that can easily be seen to reference the ecological impacts of human industry. Just as the tar of Labra Tar Pits (where I collect my tarfrom pit #91) is associated with dinosaurs trapped in its deadly clutch, so too, the tar of industrial oil spills can be seen as an intractable snare. Petroleum is now a ‘tar baby’, once so attractive now so regrettable. What better way to imply, with one stroke of ‘paint’, both the dynamics of geological time and the tradgedy of Nature at the mercy of human development and pollution.
I have further stirred this cauldron of meaning by adding other natural materials to the tar paintings. Yellow pollen dusts the surface with the promise of renewal from nature’s reproductive power. Volcanic and glass sand add grit and sparkle to the darkness of tar. Copper sulphate adds a beautiful but poisonous blue. Human ashhes bring home a sense of mortality with a somber grey. Hope and danger swirl together in Nature’s grand time scale.
2009
AN ACCIDENTAL ENCOUNTER
“Synthetic Nature” Paintings
I was hiking in a Canadian forest last fall. The leaves were turning and the sun’s dappled light was just about as high as it could get on an October day. The rythm of hiking carried me into a meditative state of mind inwhich I was pondering the difficulty I had been having finding a visual metaphor for the existential chasm that separates human nature from wild Nature. An hour or two passed. Then suddenly I was literally stopped in my tracks by a wall of plastic sheeting that someone had stretched across a large swath of forest. It must have once served some function, but now it simply stood catching the dappled light, sparkling with reflections, and obscurring the forest like a Vaseline-smeared lens. it was at once stunningly beautiful and appalling, a veil of petrochemicals separating me from thr forest. I knew I was looking at a form that could express the problems I wanted to explore in paint. The forces of the moment did not fall into simple polarized opposites of good(nature) vs. evil (industrial man). While the plastic intruded into the forest it was still a part of our chemical world and it billowed in the breeze as beautifully as any leaf. The plastic romantisized the view with its soft focus effects, but at the same time it threatened the scene with the suffocating power of a plastic bag. I knew I would paint this for a long time.
2000-2008
In recent years myfocus has been on presenting the duality between the natural and the man-made world. I have addressed this subject matter in a number of different ways in a series of recent paintings.
I am currently addressing these issues by showing the conflicted nature of human thought, and our wish to hide certain inconvenient realities from ourselves. To that end I paint a layer of plastic sheeting over my chosen imagery, wrapping the subject in a synthetic glaze. There is a poetic echoing between the way that the plastic mediates (and sometimes even romanticizes) the image it is obscuring and the way that brushstrokes of paint also mediate an image.
The duality I am focusing on is apparent when we use the right side of the brain to respond to the world in a holistic and emotional way, but often in opposition with this view, the left brain goes on to analyze advantages, problems, structural considerations, war, and competition. Part of our mind senses our unity with the world while another part divides us from it. Ultimately, we humans are living uncomfortably with conflict in our minds and my paintings seek to illuminate our thinking about this as I try to reconcile my own right and left brain responses to the world I live in.
In previous work I divided the canvas into two parts, each having different subjects that interlocked in a toothed, explosive pattern. The incongruity of the opposing subjects causes us to think about the connections between them and the difficulty of resolving human desires and long term sustainability. In this new work I am trying to consolidate the various levels of dissent into an undivided image using plastic as a metaphor for the increasing alienation of humanity from the natural world that supports us.