4/21/2013

Paintings: Some Range

Here are some more paintings I did in the 1990s.  As you can see here and on other paintings pages, the technique I used in the later 1990s had some range, with cliffs, ice, vines, and hard desert landscapes all poured from the same bottle.


It is spooky when slightly different ingredients and actions -- massaging the surface of physical phenomena like tossing pebbles on a still lake -- can suggest completely different forms.

Aside: It has given me a spooky feel for the fabric of spacetime, which is good.  If this whole universe was poured from a single bottle cooked up in a lab -- if we live in a virtual reality, a simulation set off by some scientist after adjusting a few values -- it wouldn't bother me at all.  Because our ability to appreciate its beauty, and our impulse to try to climb up out of our world into the scientist's, would not be lessened one bit.  (Excuse me, but if creationists can spit out "scientific" ideas as twisted as a can of worms and still get published in school textbooks, why should I keep my crackpot theories to myself?)

Of course color influences what's suggested, and one thing that disturbed me was how color that made inutitive sense to me seemed to "get in the way" for others; the most popular paintings were the least colorful.  Like differences in the way individuals perceive illusion, it makes me wonder sometimes just how much I can trust my vision.