3/11/15
I had a break-through moment in the studio with this painting, which for a while I couldn’t quite crack the code for what it needed to be complete. I have succeeded in creating a single, larger shape, floating on a white surface; surface tension. It both sinks into the fabric beneath the history of layers, and plays on the surface as if it merely touches. It is both convex and concave. Its illusion is subtle and yet it challenges the viewer with its size and demand for attention. It looms in a frozen moment, covered in the history of marks. The clean white backdrop is both top ground and bottom water. From afar, the shape floats, from close up it sinks. Even within the white which from afar retains a stark flat cleanliness, it holds brush strokes, bunched fabric, paper collage and paint beneath its deceptive clarity. Chaos encased and from afar masked by seeming simplicity.
This other painting I have been working on (now entitled “Beneath the Stones”), seems to continue the use of smaller moments of shape. I almost feel as if the smaller, mostly green painting in some ways screams a desire for the mask of white. It wants alteration, intead of its current fluid conformity. It feels all-over; maybe related to the piece “Overlapping of Perceived Shape”. I think there is an underlying series yet to be fully actualized. Also, the more I work, the more I realize that my drawings and collages are completely separate monsters from my paintings, so much so that I don’t believe they can even properly exist in a series together. They are about different tactile experiences entirely.
I see now two different approaches to my work:
*All-over/overlapping/shapes dominate/layers mix/no vantage point/no focus/all-encompassing. It’s chaos of energy; it overlaps and becomes lost within itself. This energy is angry, frustrated, confused and searching.
*The energy of sewing/stitching/staining; floating white and covered-in-white paintings is calm, collected, inquisitive and meditative.
Kal L. Cloonan 