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"One space spreads through all creatures equally - Inner-world space. Birds quietly flying go Flying through us"
Rainer Maria Rilke |
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For the last few years, in the Shared Consciousness series, I've been working with the challenge of combining a decades long interest in painting portraits from life with a fascination for the effects of light on water and a passion for studying wildlife. This series explores the connection between humans and the natural world on a psychological and spiritual level while, at the same time, referencing some of the markers of climate disruption and the species affected by it in a shared environmental landscape.
Painting from direct observation of the model while allowing a random grouping of heads creates many narrative possibilities. Beginning without a preconceived composition allows the free flow of ideas generated by painting the portrait of each individual model, one session at a time, on the same canvas, the only constants being the eye level line and direction of light. Working directly from life allows for greater concentration on the individual and the constant fluctuations in expression and emotion that take place over the period in which a model is posing. Once the heads and shoulders of the models are on canvas, the rest of the composition might be suggested by relationships, or non-relationships, between the models, their reflections, their environment and the addition of wildlife.
Other species might be messengers from the spirit world, messengers from the unconscious, or messengers from nature seeking to communicate with us. In the space created by merging a sense of interiority with a sense of exteriority, there exist connections with "the other". This is a world where arrays of familiar and diverse elements unite to form extraordinary circumstances, where an exterior narrative is no more unlikely than its interior counterpart, where other species conduct us to unseen, unfamiliar, or perhaps familiar, realms. |
| Figurative Paintings 2016-2017 |
| Figurative Paintings 2014-2015 |
| Figurative Paintings 2012-2013 |