Saturday, July 19, 2014

On the Bracken Line (third set) inspired by Siletz Bay, Oregon

LINK to collaborative music video with Ruben Mills: Non-Duality of Sight and Sound



I am in the midst of painting a rather large series of work inspired by the Siletz Bay.  The following eight are small 11" x 14" canvases done at Salishan, Oregon during the past week.  There is a bracken line, the constantly moving boundary between ocean salt water and Siletz River fresh water, in front of our cabin on the bay.  It is often visible as it forms, slides along outside our window, then recedes and grows placid or turbulent, waves on ripples, currents going one way, wind waves the other; brackish waters.  

I am not illustrating, per se, and so in what sense is this natural ebb and flow inspirational?  On a formal level it is about layers and counterflow.  That is enough I suppose but I do think about all of this metaphorically, perhaps more specifically metaphysically: how states of consciousness and memory overlap and are sometimes transparent, often not; how they overlap and co-exist, how they shift and merge, separate and exist at times independent, other times inter-dependent of one another; how the mind coalesces and connects what it perceives to be forms from the soup of experience even as it dissolves.  Visual poetics that defy naming; flux and swell and illumination, obfuscation and elucidation, my brush tracing in process what appear as assertions ,more found than posited. 


















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