Blow-up

This post is going to be brief because I am in the midst of writing a paper and studying for an exam. This is a larger version of one of the Klimtian Copies posted below (8.5 x 11 rather than 4 x 6). It's in acrylic paint with white and colored paper cut-outs. The two versions look quite different in life, but not so different digitally, which I find somewhat interesting.

Color Tunnels

In September, a colleague gave me a book of poetry by Wislawa Szymborska because, he said, my artwork brought it to his mind. I'm usually a rather tepid lover of poetry--sometimes it strikes just right, other times I throw it away in frustration--but I do love this collection, and I would like to believe that her literary style can be related to my visual style. So here is an experiment of sorts.

I have recently returned to an aspiration to paint highways. I've skirted around this subject matter for some time now, doing a few, mostly unsuccessful, paintings over the past couple of years. The very first, which was successful, can be found in the initial post on this blog (Northeast Extension). I am drawn to the monochromaticity of highways during winter: gray roads, gray-ish salt- and dirt-encrusted cars, gray trees, gray skies. These dull shades are punctuated by sudden interludes of intense color from construction signage (orange), rest-stop signage (blue), directional signage (green), and finally, the lights from passing cars. At night, too, there is a monochromaticity, but with added dimensions of blue, black, and purple.

I spent a good chunk of time over the Thanksgiving break driving in the wee hours of the morning as well as in the middle of the night, often surrounded by thick fog. I was struck again by how the world takes on a beautiful, indistinct haze; it is a tunnel through grays and blues, and ground and sky become inseparable. This serves to sharpen the moments of color, rendering them fierce and aggressive reminders of a world away from the highway.

When creating the below piece, From Pittsburgh, I also looked to the following poem by Szymborska for inspiration:

Sky

I should have begun with this: the sky.
A window minus sill, frame, and panes.
An aperture, nothing more
but wide open

I don't have to wait for a starry night,
I don't have to crane my neck
to get a look at it.
I've got the sky behind my back, at hand, and on my eyelids.
The sky binds me tight
and sweeps me off my feet.

Even the highest mountains are no closer to the sky
than the deepest valleys.
There's no more of it in one place
than another.
A mole is no less in seventh heaven
than the owl spreading her wings.
The object that falls in an abyss
falls from sky to sky.

Grainy, gritty, liquid,
inflamed, or volatile
patches of sky, specks of sky,
gusts and heaps of sky.
The sky is everywhere,
even in the dark beneath your skin.
I eat the sky, I excrete the sky.
I'm a trap within a trap,
an inhabited inhabitant, an embrace embraced,
a question answering a question.

Division into sky and earth--
it's not the proper way
to contemplate this wholeness.
It simply lets me go on living
at a more exact address
where I can be reached promptly
if I'm sought.
My identifying features
are rapture and despair.

Szymborska, Wistawa. "Sky." Poems New and Collected 1957-1997. New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1998.



There are more of these to come, I think.