Paradigm I

oil on canvas, 36" x 48"

Getting away from the “safe” perspective of the viewer at eye-level and elevating the viewpoint to a ‘bird’s-eye’ view, I have become more preoccupied with the ‘tension vs. movement’ of traffic (the maze or labyrinth of urban centers), the ‘ant-farm’ of life as seen from above, and the “stop and go” that upsets our natural need to move forward without obstacles.

“Inertia”, in my interpretation; represents the laws of motion.  When prohibited from the freedom to continue, there are repercussions (stress, accidents, chance meetings, road rage, apathy, tension, and above all displacement).

This series is a cause and effect response.  Generally when I close the studio door behind me I can address recent events effecting or motivating my work.  For example, as a native of New York City, I have an over heightened awareness of the sensitivity of others and the immediate environment around me.  Like others my reality altered on 9/11 and the city came pouring down into my work.  The perceptual views are for me particularly taught and tense as I relate emotionally to that event and other similar chaos, such as driving through the August 24th, 2003  Blackout, on my first wedding anniversary.

Here I am looking at a glance, as if to be driving at an accelerated rate observing out the window only to capture a fraction in time, a place of subconscious interest, investigating what is common, overlooked, and potentially dangerous.  The paintings themselves become the marker of both place and felt/observed reality.  I want to catch the sudden shift of light and change as if follows the viewer, a chance blitzkrieg, at the magical hour, when time stops, and life is transformed.

In my paintings, I wish to diminish the banality of everyday life and take common, overlooked places and people (often in urban landscapes; undergoing constant reconstruction, change and transformation), capturing a snapshot (an instantaneous, slightly blurred image, stamped on the collective memory) made into a form of high-art. By addressing the subject matter and disregarding the details, specifically the activity in a gutter, over a bridge, and ambulance dashes across the page, the importance of it all, the danger of the moment, the pace and tranquility of the unknown… I want to seize on the mysterious, perplexing and real.

            Researching these moments, their significance and develop my ability to render them in paint, drawing the viewer into a window of momentary time. My interests are embedded in what is happening in my surroundings. What is important to me are the day-to-day experiences and in the end, I want to challenge these immediate environments again and again using the canvas as my compass.

            Painting urban landscapes, in motion, is a form of deconstruction the rigid stillness of architecture, by tracing the movement of buzzing life that runs through it. With this body of work, I am exploring new methodologies (with signifiers that draw on memory, the memory of images, while driving (for example) that stay in your mind, long after they have past), and from compiling composite photographs.

            Something is also to be said of the irreplaceable hand of the painter and becoming fluid and dexterous in the investigation of brush and paint (isolating the mark). By painting my peripheral vision, I want to put the viewer in the landscape. The viewer can then sense and feel the familiar environment, at a faster pace, as something more lasting.

            I also delight in the opportunity and future prospects of teaching the application of color schemes, brush techniques and figure/ground relationships as these can be applied through both traditional and alternative methods (found for example in the works of Henri Matisse, primarily his studio habits of painting the image with one single line stroke and making it count from the first instance, if not having to re-prime the canvas), or Ashile Gorky’s late work, such as his interpretation of natural forms (primarily of his family in nature); a concept of painting stillness vs. movement. I want the population of my figures to arrive out of an observation that traces the brief intervals of the pedestrian movement through crowds, cars, streets, lights etc… recording the actual path of the roaming eye across the scenes or intersection of this kind of urban activity. Rather than paint an impressionistic or expressionistic time, space and figure relationship, I want to incorporate digital era “imaging,” not on the computer, but on the canvas, thus techniques that arrive by looking: as if me eyes are the camera, a visual radar of technical motion infused with intervals of simultaneous past, present, and future played-out as a construction of the postmodern “Cosmo polis.” Although only a slight diversion from the familiar cityscape, for me this dizzying pace can only be portrayed as an image, disoriented, lost, swerving into a tilt, and infused with color.