At the heart of this piece is the line that appears where two color fields, one cobalt blue and one titanium white, collide. But neither field is monochrome or monolithic. Each contains additional collisions, some as a result of the titanium white with which the entire hardboard surface is primed, some as a result of "imperfections" and variations in the surface itself, and some as a result of the process of dragging and scraping acrylic paint on the white primed hardboard with a pallette knife and brush. As a "purely" abstract collision of color fields, the painting could be oriented in any way: it is not marked "this end up."
But the title, Sierra Blanca, might predispose a viewer to see the white field as a mountain with jagged peaks on top. (If I had called it "Blue Mountains," it might be otherwise.) I see this as another kind of collision playing with and on painting and the surface on which this painting was done, that between text and image. The title also calls to mind a particular mountain -- Sierra Blanca, near Ruidoso, New Mexico, on Mescalero Apache land. This is still another collision, the kind of collision that occurs whenever a thing or a place or a person is named (and also when the name is translated or applied over or in place of an existing name). If you know that mountain, you might be inclined to see the line I said is at the heart of this work as the jagged edge of a white peak against a blue sky. But if memory (another set of collisions) serves, Sierra Blanca is not so much a single mountain as a moment in a volcanic range, the jagged edges of which are etched in the blue field as well as the white, with the sky above us out of sight, out of mind.
This is what I have in mind when I call my work "lyrical abstraction." Taken by a line, I take it for a walk, hoping it will take you in, hoping you will see what you can make of it, hoping what is right before our eyes is more than meets the eye, hoping that dwelling on it with a cloud of witnesses will give us a taste of the wisdom that sits in places.
- Subject Matter: abstract
- Created: December 2020
- Collections: acrylic, landscapes