Loving and Losing It.

Sound Creating an Eddy in Reality, 2010, oil on canvas, 36"x24"

The Birth of the Electric Tree, 2010, oil on canvas, 30"x40"

Both of these paintings technically reference Piet Mondrian. The Flutist, or Sounds Creating an Eddy in Reality, came first. It captures the struggle of composition vs. narrative, abstraction vs. illustration, and I see it as a stepping stone painting. It also makes use of an idea of artists as shamans or artists (in this case the flute player) affecting reality. As a painter, I can only suggest the way the flute player affects reality through visual representation. I love the way musician's can affect large groups of people and wish I had any notion of stage presence, but I will persist making paintings in isolation, hoping the straggling viewers privately leave with something gained for the positive.
So, The Birth of the Electric Tree began in my mind in the same way the flute player ended. Here are two street musicians, a fiddler and a guitar player, and they are going to affect reality in some massive way. I kept balking at completing this one the way I had set out to complete it, so I detoured with two abstract drawings of the musicians, hoping to reveal their true identities as shamans.

Fiddler Shaman: With Our Love We Can Change the World, 2010, charcoal, watercolor and acrylic on paper, 18"x24"

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Guitarist Shaman, 2010, charcoal, watercolor and acrylic on paper, 18"x24"

I decided to use these representations of the shaman musicians in my painting, rather than adhering to their photographic forms. One more concept I've been toying with, which I feel the Electric Tree painting alludes to, but will appear later in a new painting, is a future where our distinction between nature and home disappears and nature is just like home. Maybe some sort of spiritual symbiosis can occur and the trees will mutate into self-heating tents and other architecture that comforts us. In the meantime, humans would return to their post as servants of the earth and all its creatures.