Aerial View

oil on panel

Another unsatisfactory painting provided the fodder for this one on top. I always liked the fairytale Rumpelstiltskin and the concept of turning straw into gold; I think most artists do. The painting combines inspiration from plane views. In one flight one often sees farms, fields, the sky coming between us and the world. People's pools, highways, and parking lots of cars near Newark, newly arrived from overseas, also catch my curiosity, but this painting derives from the rural. Geometric but permeable, it has implications for memory, time, experience, the defined and changing self.
A fellow student at Massachusetts College of Art made paintings in this vein. They were abstractions, less about the landscape, but very heavy on layering and rich in color. I forget her name, but I attended her ninetieth birthday party then, in 1991. Even Shrek talks about his inner complexity in terms of layers, "like an onion" the ogre explains. While I enjoy the freshness of a thin wash like Matisse [his studio assistant used to remove the paint from the canvas with turpentine at the end of the day so he could begin again at the start of the next without any accumulation. It was important to have the luminosity from the white of the canvas through the color and to remove texture which would impede the large shapes of colored light he made.] I also can create light through the interaction of color despite density. The painting has history; the texture,like wrinkles, is the hard-won evidence of the journey.