At and Just Below

At and Just Below

An undulating wave surface is like breath moving through the body. There is a moment of suspension—a gap—between incoming and outgoing movement. The turbulence at the surface slows, stabilizing itself into a lacy pattern before the next incoming wave. Surface stillness contains the residue of past action.

The paintings in the “At and Just Below” series use the movement of the ocean’s surface as a metaphor for our inner emotional and psychological spaces. The paintings direct our attention to spaces where surface movement is contrary to and partially conceals the movement below. Here the perceiving mind struggles to hold both layers simultaneously with equal awareness and without preference. The paintings, while investigating the processes of perception and attention, describe the entanglement of past action, of temporary suspension, and of emotional accumulation, interlude, and force.

The paintings in this series extend beyond the movement of the ocean and the stillness of the surrounding tidal pools as subject matter to include intense emotion, felt sense, and especially the part of our psyche where we experience something in the body before it is named in the mind. In them, I incorporate the entire scope of the perceiving body. In this way, these paintings depict embryonic states of being and tumultuous interior landscapes.

The most prominent visual elements in the paintings are defined by and described through their relative relationship to the surrounding layers of paint, scratched or scraped when wet to reveal the intense chromatic ground below. In this way, the painting process dramatizes the initial, inchoate presence of a feeling—that sense of knowing something in the body before the discriminating mind names the experience.