The way that I think and the way I develop paintings might qualify as an “obsession to know more by organizing what [I] know in new ways.”* I have a particular attraction to paradoxes and dualities; in order to know something, I need to also examine what it is not. This notion establishes the foundation for my interest in the relationship between painting and film.
In specific, I am concerned with the way film imagery heavily influences or ‘contaminates’ the ways people read, remember, and imagine environments. In my paintings, I represent the confusion of spatial experience as mediated by film, by transferring the way an environment is presented in film into the compressed space of a painting. My paintings of landscapes and interior spaces employ visual cues and archetypical compositions from film as a point-of-departure. My intent is to take the collectively understood presentation of space in cinema and use it as an entry point into painting-specific space and dialogue. These paintings propose alternative ways to read and respond to familiar cinematic spaces, outside of their traditional context of a narrative sequence. A typical cinematic threshold or portal no longer serves as a transitional space to be passed through when it is portrayed in the static space of a painting. Instead, it becomes a contemplative, mysterious, expectant space where resolution is found in the examination of painting form and process, instead of through a narrative trajectory.
I begin my studio process by watching and capturing a significant number of still images from films. I also observe or photograph spaces from my immediate surroundings that I find myself inherently viewing cinematically, and make small maquette "sets" in the studio to paint from. Next, I spend time synthesizing all of these resources into new, invented spaces, creating small collage studies and dioramas to use as guides for my paintings. When painting, I work to develop the image from my collage study into a very painting-specific space by creating varied marks, paint surfaces, and other formal relationships that repurpose our familiar expectations of cinematic space.
(*Saltz, Jerry. “Fever Dreams,” New York Magazine. Feb 21, 2008)
In specific, I am concerned with the way film imagery heavily influences or ‘contaminates’ the ways people read, remember, and imagine environments. In my paintings, I represent the confusion of spatial experience as mediated by film, by transferring the way an environment is presented in film into the compressed space of a painting. My paintings of landscapes and interior spaces employ visual cues and archetypical compositions from film as a point-of-departure. My intent is to take the collectively understood presentation of space in cinema and use it as an entry point into painting-specific space and dialogue. These paintings propose alternative ways to read and respond to familiar cinematic spaces, outside of their traditional context of a narrative sequence. A typical cinematic threshold or portal no longer serves as a transitional space to be passed through when it is portrayed in the static space of a painting. Instead, it becomes a contemplative, mysterious, expectant space where resolution is found in the examination of painting form and process, instead of through a narrative trajectory.
I begin my studio process by watching and capturing a significant number of still images from films. I also observe or photograph spaces from my immediate surroundings that I find myself inherently viewing cinematically, and make small maquette "sets" in the studio to paint from. Next, I spend time synthesizing all of these resources into new, invented spaces, creating small collage studies and dioramas to use as guides for my paintings. When painting, I work to develop the image from my collage study into a very painting-specific space by creating varied marks, paint surfaces, and other formal relationships that repurpose our familiar expectations of cinematic space.
(*Saltz, Jerry. “Fever Dreams,” New York Magazine. Feb 21, 2008)
