Journey of an Image
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The other day (one of those glorious Central Texas days of bright sun and cool winds) I was standing in line at the post office. A young man behind me made a statement and followed it with a question: “I have seen your art work. I do not understand the images. Where do they come from?” While in line at the post office, you do not get into long involved answers so I said: “I try to see the world from the sky.” He shook his head at that and looked away. On the way home, driving by a silvery Lake Waco, I turned my mind upon an answer to the question for myself: “Where do the present images come from?” My first idea about how I see the world started while lying on my back for two years with rheumatic heart disease, viewing the ceiling and all its images. I was 9. After recovering, in high school, sitting on the third floor in the art room when no one else was around, I spend many afternoons looking down at the Pittsburgh snow and the tracks left by automobiles in the parking lot. On Saturdays, I went to art school at Carnegie Museum of Fine Arts and viewed the Greek statuary below my balcony view. I made a good living out of this way of seeing. My fascination with “sky views” helps me with visionary arts management, like directing a museum or seeing all aspects of a fine arts department or planning for grants. In grade school, my mother criticized the hours on hours that I spent making every airplane that the kits allowed. My mom’s concern was that I would become a loner in my passion for flight. Of course, later, I played all the sports so she and my dad eventually knew that this was not the only pastime that I had. They loved me but were not into creative seeing and certainly not seeing the world from on high. My vision was where you see patterns instead of details and panoramas instead of borders. In the early 1990’s I learned that there was a word for the way that I see. It is called “parallax vision”. Many modern architects see their buildings from a satellite point of view for lighting and design. Steven Hull is a prime example of a world-class architect (who happens to come from Texas) who sees in this fashion. With this history of seeing from above instead of a Renaissance vision which in straight ahead, I began to explore other 20th and 21st century techniques: i.e., looking through microscopes at crystals and viewing satellite photos of cites and country sides. The one element that did not come from intellect and research was my love of color and how it excites my senses. That has always been a part of my recipe for living therefore I joined color with parallax vision to make new images without a frame. Skyview images are without edges, being guided only by their internal shapes. Life has no boundaries when you view objects as molecules and atoms and patterns instead of calling them “still life, portrait and landscape” (a 19th century “What is it?” way of seeing). There is no up or down, only the experience of seeing something for the first time from a great and/or super-close distance. The Renaissance way of seeing everything from an arbitrary 13 feet 4 inches was not needed in my journey toward an image. In the late 1990s I began to fly different places in the world and my sky-view was re-enforced. You cannot fly over Kansas and Nevada without seeing the patterns of how farmers have changed our view of the traditional landscape. In painting, the trick is to have a view from the clouds or through a microscope and yet made it specific by how you control the paint. The series of 2004 and 2005, I could now tell that gentlemen at the post office, is that parallax way of seeing while adding some detailed images of sanded sticks and their shadows (kept separate so that they are seen independent of each other). I call this series “Building America” because that is the way I see our democracy being built: a few sticks which eventually become structures for living, banking, education, etc, the shadows which take on a life of their own and parallax vision which rules the technological revolution of this great land. |
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