It’s Not Just a Pretty Space

girlreadingPart of the reason why I like making paintings and looking at paintings is because they are quiet. It’s not just a form of escapism, but it’s a place in the mind where we can go and be our true selves. Either looking at a painting, painting, reading a book, listening to music, meditating, these are vehicles that take us to a residing place where we experience meaning.

Sometimes when I’m in the studio and have an idea, I am residing so much in that idea that when I go to the kitchen to fill up my coffee cup, I am literally tip toeing so as not to disturb it (the idea, not the coffee). It’s a little bit like when you’re dreaming, and you’re half awake, and you’re trying to get back into the dream.

I can only reside in that idea when there is such silence that everything stands still. It is a little bit like another dimension. When you’re making art, you’re always trying to get to that dimension. When you’re residing in it, that’s when your artwork has succeeded.

I think a painting is good when it reflects that meditative state that the artist was in, that third dimension. It’s amazing to me that a moment of a person’s being, can be transferred on to a piece of paper by way of art, and be held there long after we’re gone.

I think this piece is a little bit about all of the above. In my past personal work, I think there is always this theme. I’m interested in this link between imagination spaces and actual interior spaces. When I was researching for my thesis in school, I came across Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space: the classic look at how we experience intimate places.

“…an inquiry focused on the house, its interior places, and its outdoor context, The Poetics of Space resonates deeply, vibrating at the edges of imagination, exploring the recesses of the psyche, the hallways of the mind. In the house, Bachelard discovers a metaphor of humanness.”

“…in poetry and in folktale, in modern psychology and modern ornithology, Bachelard find the bits and pieces of evidence he weaves into his argument that the house is a nest for dreaming, a shelter for imagining…his insistance that people need houses in order to dream, in order to imagine…”