The Truest Harvest of my daily life
are as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning and evening. It is a
little stardust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched.
Henry Thoreau, Walden
The following 120
(or so) paintings are a representative selection of the art in my book, Nature's Rights.
In these works, to those who know how to look, is the truest report of myself.
There are other paintings form these years, but this is a solid selection. Most of them were done between 1997 and 2005. A few are from the Point Reyes
series, (1986-89, 97-99). I include a few of the Point Reyes paintings partly because they
appear in the Natures' Rights book, but also because they indicate a
continuity of aesthetic and naturalist concerns that reach back many years .
I think it is useful to see these paintings aside from the poetry and prose that
they resonate with inside the book. In some respects images are closer to reality,
more telling and more suggestive than expression in language, which tends to be
too abstract-- ' a picture is worth a thousand words', as the saying
goes. Of course it is true our society is rife with image overload, excessively
so. So it is not at all sure that many people will be able to see what I tried
so hard to put into these images. But this is why I combine words and imagines
so much: the words and imagines condition each other and help inform and teach
modes of perception.
There is in these paintings a certain presence or evocation of light and being
that communicate something beyond words. Seeing the paintings on their own
suggests a certain collective poetry, a vision of the world, gathered over a 20
year period. This vision is not just a development of certain ideas about
landscape----though it is that too---
but a physical understanding of light and existence on earth. This physical
understanding is an understanding,
moreover, precedes any struggle with, or denial of religion. These are painting
born of observation and place are in no way metaphors for delusions of the
divine. These are paintings that reject any theism and relish in the physical
and the earthy. They are
paintings that begin to love the earth, light and the fact of existence for its
own sake. Monet said he wanted to paint the air and light in between himself and
his subjects, what he called the "enveloppe"-- the
surround of light and space. That is not exactly what I am trying to do. I have
tried to express the light/air 'envelope' on occasion, but I think my concern
was more a concrete sense of actual existence, in many dimensions, not just from
the point of view of light and air. So for instance, I have tried to express the
dignity and importance of individual animals or birds within the actuality of
space and light. James Joyce in Portrait of the Artist, somewhat
pretentiously, said he wanted to express it the "ineluctable modality of
the visible", and yes, that is something I try to show too. But into this envelope and modality of the visible, I sought to situate the
human and animal subject, animals being conceived of as quite equal to humans in
their right to space and light. So these are paintings that are about both perception
and the facts of existence.
But they are not just that. They are not about themselves, these are not "post
modern" pictures, as they assume a actual
world out here. There is a reality. We are not merely perceivers. So these are
works that praise existence and actuality. In this sense these go against the
dissolving tendency of Monet and Joyce. They are young works in many ways
too. These only begin to be tempered by suffering. For the most part they are
images of satisfaction and unashamed celebration of landscapes and beings I have
loved, both human and non human. They
are about the joy of life and existing experienced by myself and many other
species.
