Three Landscapes
The three landscape collage paintings here illustrated were all begun within a half hour one morning in May of 2023. In this free interval my intuitions of how to recreate the appearance of nature’s processes, and more importantly, our experiences of them, were accessible to me in an absolute sense. My visual transcriptions in these works of how we interact with nature over time: the sequences of perception, the apprehension of unfolding form and, with it, variety, was an accomplishment that required my patience: the paintings were finished only in September of 2023.
I envision no ready end of this series of works; the prospect of a sustained and successful commitment to creating paintings that are genuinely beautiful is my consuming motive.
Statement of Purpose in Landscape
My ambition is to create landscape paintings that are beautiful to everyone. Rather than boasting a philosophical claim, my intention in this regard is based on a commitment to reach the entire audience rather than just part of it. (Despite the absence of any philosophical ambition, my thoughts are in the main traceable back to the Enlightenment thinker Emanuel Kant, who developed a compelling alternative to relativism in aesthetic matters.)
Universality of impact is possible because all people have the capacity and the inclination, as a kind of inevitable mind set, to experience and consider the relationships between nature’s appearance and an artist’s transformation of it. Especially in landscape painting, where nature is the full and exclusive subject of the image, all people will tend to go to the same place in their minds and awareness: the place where they consider how good (i.e. how suitable) is the artist’s transformation of nature and its processes. In play here is a kind of willing suspension of disbelief in which all spectators are drawn to experience the artwork in a special, imaginative way, AS THOUGH IT WAS ACTUALLY NATURE and at the same time, hopefully in the case of my paintings, as a beautiful transformation of nature’s appearances and processes (and Kant would add here purposes). Here is a paradox: in order for the viewers to experience my work as beautiful it must in a sense, and in passing, look like a product or part of nature itself rather than a product of my consciously acting or controlling human intellect. This is so because there must be no feeling in the viewer that the work is constrained or limited by rules or theories in terms of which it has been created, and hence look like something lesser than nature itself, something that goes against what nature is. Instead, it must seem to BE nature even though in another sense it is estimated and appreciated by my viewers as my transformative creation. It’s a question of looking at a landscape painting and thinking/feeling “yes, that is what nature IS, the artist has gotten what nature IS into the work.” [c.f. Kant, Critique of Judgement, sections, 8, 45.]
So I believe that everyone is predisposed to experience landscape painting in this same way; and although therefore subjective (because the experience of the work dwells in the consciousness of each individual viewer), the apprehension of beauty in my work is universal, that is, framed by thought and awareness in the same way in the selves of each and every person.
