I.
Henri Bergson observed that ultimate reality is an underlying web of connections and the brain screens out the larger reality. The objects in my paintings form connections. They connect to me and they reach for connection to other people’s realities and paradigms. I believe that art in its many forms has the power to change people’s lives in a positive direction–but this only occurs when connections are made; when one is dreaming others’ dreams and objectifying their realities.
II.
He had a sense when he joined the marines that the country he was skying out of was a known locale, with a character that was exact and coordinate and that maintained a patterned feel. A thing you could get back with if you had a reason. But that patterned feel had gotten disrupted somehow, as though everything whole had separated a little inch, and he had dropped back in between things, to being on the peripherery without a peripheral perspective.
–Richard Ford
The Ultimate Good Luck (1981)
I’m interested in the power of realities that operate in the difficult to define, grey area between the past, present, and future, between different culturally described groups, and between the conscious and the unconscious. I believe that in the “little inch” between things the local and the global and life and death have overlapped. I describe my paintings as metaphorical realism; I think of them as ambiguous, open-ended statements that are not arbitrary, but solidly attached to specific people, places and things. They represemt my personal experience, concerns and views; some are visions of provisional utopias, as well as cultural critiques. I paint slowly using thin layers of paint and small brushes, modeling colors until they reach a luminescent quality that reflects a heightened sense of realism, a realism that transforms reality.
III.
Over the past several years (1995-98) I’ve found myself engaged in a re-visioning of the world that required me to scan across a wide cultural landscape for information, ideas, and interrogations that affirm and inform my own feminist, social, political and psychic agendas. I have always believed that art and life are inseparable and that art could be about more than itself–in fact had to be in order to survive in any meaningful sense.
In a society that is increasingly dependent upon the link between cognition and seeing through amazing new imaging technologies, I want to create images that trouble, resist, disturb and offer provisional visions of love, hope, and well-being. The world has changed and we are all transformed by these new technical visualizations like computerized simulations, video, miraculous new medical imaging devices, LAND SAT photos, satellite weather maps, galaxy simulations, micro-cinematography, and many more. We must learn to embrace these new technologies and their medical uses while questioning some of their implications.
All of this machining disembodies the lived body. And the recoding of vision derived from them suggest that visual aptitude and learning is not just an aesthetic luxury, but may be a matter of life or death–as in the reading of images by radiologists, meteorologists, and environmentalists to name a few. In visually diagnostic disciplines, manual, perceptual, and mental operations are centrally involved with revealing, structuring, and interpreting signs and symptoms that cannot be written. The connection between visible surface and invisible depth becomes crucial. In order to discover and exhibit the inarticulate relationship of interior to exterior, idea to form, private pathos to public patterns, from local events to global ramifications, heightened visual skills and new critical thinking become necessary.
Painting is constitutive of the cognitive and it requires mental and manual skill to construct. Underneath a work of art are traces of what shaped it and art allied with other sources can serve as a vibrant shaper of knowledge as well as emotional experience.
IV.
I am a feminist. For me a feminist is anyone who identifies with everyone who is secondary in a primary world, regardless of gender, race, age, social class, or sexual preference. Feminist artists have been standing on shifting critical terrain for sometime. We have been surrounded by texts instructing us in the strategies of necessary exclusions and compelling inclusions in an attempt to re-present female bodies, their sexuality and subjectivity. My work has been shifting back and forth across boundaries of time, history, culture and levels of consciousness. I am working to create representations of women that acknowledge our awareness of a culturally constructed world and still recognize the unique experiences and choices made within that world as well as what is left out–what is unrepresentable.
I am trying to reclaim female subjectivity by being specific and particularizing with my subjects, by creating metaphoric realities that express my personal views and paint with an experience of the body, a kind of empathic introspection, i.e. trying to permeate the subjectivity of others by experiencing them in myself.
V. Magic Coast
Try to love this beautiful country in which we live;
It is innocent of the horrors that take place in it.
For my part I try to love the sky
–Simone Weil
In this time of churning technological, social and political change, I have taken spiritual refuge in the Texas coast, in places where the sky meets the land and sea.
Six years ago I began painting the coast from the perspective of loss and absence, indeed, even inventing spirits in the form of floating, transparent objects to console me. In the last two years I have begin to re-populate my paintings, first with quiet shorebirds at twilight, and recently with the human figure. Unlike the figures in my earlier paintings, these figures do not stand out against the natural environment, but are enfolded in clouds, land, water, and light.
The spirits in these recent paintings are intermediaries between the natural world and the metaphysical world. Usually appearing only momentarily, they are the sights that make me catch my breath. Their presence is embodied in the light that illuminates the sky and water everywhere on the coast. They are swimming and soaring in the rays of a sunset over the Indianola marsh or floating in a silvery cove in Matagorda Bay. They glory in a Tiepolo sky and form fish-shaped clouds silhouetted by moonlight.
I’ve wanted these marsh paintings—with their glowing moons and setting suns and illuminated clouds—to capture those magical moments when nature itself seems to coincide with art. Most of them are small and painted on wood. I use multiple layers of thin oil paint to slowly build a luminous quality. The shadow-box frames lined with black velvet allow the paintings to float in a deep void.
Painting these pictures has taught me that the experience of being in nature can never be fully described by art. But if I can evoke the spirit of the experience, including the sheer pleasure and its wild elements, then the magic coast has put me in my place—finite and scared.
VI. Elegiac Landscapes
1. Space haunted by spiritual powers
2. Shadow cast by our thoughts
3. A world without us in our material state
4. Each significant loss is the loss of a world
5. We learn to live with our ghosts or specters
6. The essence of images is inaccessible and mysterious
7. Summoning up the depths, unrevealed yet manifest
8. Absence as presence
9. A riddle that holds the enigma of death at its center
10. And what end but love, that stares death in the eye
11. The beyond of this journey- a return of the dead
12. The angel at the tomb “he is not here, he is elsewhere”
13. Mysterious astral beings, wraithlike figures—illuminated from within—sculpted out of the black abyss
14. The existence of suprasensuous creatures – living with the invisible
15. The imagination roams the depths of a painting
16. Ephemeral transitions – from the realm of phantoms
17. Landscapes rendered as if nature starts to speak and move
18. Where nature coincides with art – revealing the invisible networks connecting us
19. A dark void of incarnate souls
20. Worlds that absorb absence
21. Dreams of immortality
22. We are always haunted, surrounded by the remainders of loss forms of life.
23. We are always in a certain sense, within the dimension of loss and abandonment
24. Beyond where we can go back
25. Souls dancing
26. Sacred Wedding in the night
27. Across forbidden zones
28. Night the astonishing, the stranger to all that is human
29. An irreplaceable vessel of enlightenment
30. My joy rays around me, holds me, concealed from you, hides me like a creature swathed in its own silk
31.May my love go with you, you are surrounded by it like a winged garment that carries loved ones upward.
Quotes from Rilke
“ A landscape that corresponds to one’s inner life”
“The ideal paradigm of painting corresponds to the thing being said—the feeling expressed..”
“ The tormented sense of our human incompleteness from which leaps the demand for transformation”
“ You must change your life “
“the angels of the elegies are mirrors”
“ No where, beloved, will world be but within us. Our life passes in transformation” ( 7th Elegy)
“Someday emerging at last from the violent insight / let me sing out jubilation and praise to assenting angels” ( 10th elegy )
VII. Matters of Life and Death
When conceptualizing my paintings as a whole, I see them as many layers with various themes threaded in the stratigraphy. The whole moves like a Mobius strip up and down, back and forth, in and around and out. It is an imaging and witnessing that is grounded in reality and the earth and moves up through layers of transitional consciousness beyond reality into a strangeness that sometimes enters etheric realms making the cycles we see matters of life and death that leave us neither here nor beyond.
July 2017
Lynn Randolph