These first three images are from a series "Snapshots" that I have been working on for the past several months. The first is Make A Rising Performance, the second is Long Beach Island, and the third is Northeast Extension. They are all oil on gessoed paper, 4x6" in size. These pieces serve as my investigation into perception, environment, and memory. I am especially interested in how the instantaneous moment of observation, or sensation, translates into a long-term memory of the moment and environment. This has developed into a style that oscillates between painterly and illustrative. I allow the spatial environment (usually interior, but occasionally exterior) to be softer and fuzzier, while sharpening and flattening the decorative and colorful bits that are sharp in my mind. I try to work from memory, exclusively, but occasionally I work from a combination of life and memory. I've chosen the standard photograph size because I want to juxtapose the idea of an instantaneous snapshot, or capture of information, against the lengthy re-hashing of the moment in oil paint. And, when you hold all the pieces together, flipping through as you would flip through a photo album, the information in each piece is diminished. I believe that looking at all the pieces, so similar in size and format, in rapid succession parallels the way we deal with the immense visual experience we undergo every day: incapable of taking it all in, aware of only certain details. I therefore put the viewer through my own process of taking in and storing information. Unfortunately, this newfangled blog thingy doesn't really capture that part of the experiment so well.
3 comments:
Caitlin - it would help immensely if you took and then either posted (or at least linked to) significantly higher-resolution and larger photos. 6x8 portrayed in tiny JPEGs is really hard to discern (snapshot 2 is particularly hard to make out).
Even those of us who aren't shy about criticizing might feel a mite shy when it's difficult to really look at the artwork in question.
I do like this posting idea in general, though!
Caitlin, in what way, if any, do you make it known to the viewer that this is an (however impossible) attempt at simulation rather than an attempt at abstraction? This, it seems to me (not knowing anything about art), is the main difference between these works and the different kinds of scene painting throughout history. Do you think the word "Snapshot" in the title is enough to make this idea clear? Do you care? If you don't care, why don't you?
This blog's a great idea, Caitlin! I agree with Miguel that it would be nice if the images were larger. In the meantime, I paste a "print screen" into a Word document and expand it to 300% - a little cumbersome, but it works.
Love your new entry (the beach scene). It reminds me of lazy days on the beach at Caladonia Island (off the coast of Dunedin).
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