This work, though part of my ongoing body of painting work since 2022 that deals with landscape, memory and fiction, is not meant to have an accompanying prose work. This work was just about vibing, to be honest, though writing it that way sounds more dismissive than I mean. I was playing, really, and trying to feel this place where I have lived for most of my life–there was no distinct memory I was reaching for, from which to draw specifics. Imagine conditions that might have happened twenty times, or more, like: swimming in the pool, then the rain starts, but you remain in the pool and swim, as long as there’s no thunder; or being at the beach before the afternoon summer storms arrive and watching them roll in darkly from the horizon, maybe dashing to the shelter to wait out the bay-born rain and wind until it passes; or all the puddles in the grass, the driveway, the street, the feel of the air which is cooler, but also steamy. Imagine the way this place (Miami, South Florida, the Keys, or the Bahamas, if you like) holds you close in the humidity, the way the air is an embrace, the way the water feels the same temperature as your skin, but that somehow, both probably and improbably at the same time, there is so much sun, and it is always there, in dialog with the water.
I started this work immediately after “Behind the Ixora”, so they share characteristics. Though “Behind the Ixora” is meant to deal with the hidden, with the secret, with the layered, this one was meant to be about being broadly open, while sharing some of the same marks and rhythm. In the former, I wanted to use paint to tell a story; in this one, I wanted to use paint to tell place.
This work has something technical that is very difficult to see except in person: a glaze overlay (traditional oil-painting technique), but I’ve used it like a radial color gradient in a digital program. You might be able to tell the yellow in the upper-right of the work, which blends into a very cool, very transparent milky blue. The glaze shifts all the colors underneath, which, on a screen, we don’t register very well, since the light is shining out into our eyes, but when the actual artwork is in front of you, and the light your eyes receives is that which bounces back from the oil-painted paper substrate, then you are more aware of the depth of color.