View

View; 6" x 12", oil on panel, 2010

The well-known artist Ann Hamilton invented a special camera using her mouth. Her mouth is the camera body into which she inserts film. When she opens her mouth, it functions as a shutter to let in light. Intrigued by the idea of using one sensory organ to act as another, she combines the mouth with the sense of sight. The relationship of the body to taking the picture is different; it's not about eye-level. Hamilton creates people's portraits with her mouth camera. You can read PBS's Art 21 interview on the subject here. She has also written a book with Joan Simon titled Ann Hamilton: An Inventory of Objects which delves deeper into the project.

View has a similar kind of bracketing as the mouth camera portraits but the method, oil painting, is almost as old as the hills. Hamilton says the oval shaped pictures made from her mouth camera look like an eye, the person's portrait in the center, a "pupil". While not formatted as an oval, View, as with many of my paintings, is about the experience of looking out through something to what light reveals in the center. It is a particular favorite of mine because it looks fresh, free from labor, as if the subject was always there and you just came upon it. It feels as if you were lost in the woods and made it out, the black forms a bit ominous, the center a relief. It is a primordial world. The people in Hamilton's photographs are caught where they are, a part of their real selves captured in a blink. They are ready for a time capsule. My landscape is outside linear time, something that always was, the fruition of my search. It looks forward and back. Don't forget to change the clocks.