DD092713 (Sea Lungs) Painting

DD092713 (Sea Lungs) was inspired by a recent trip to the sea. The choice to make the painting prominently gray references the color of the water and sand just after dusk. The sea was simultaneously calming and peaceful yet mysterious, terrifying and latently dangerous. When I finished the painting I was talking with my wife about it, she found it very calming which really surprised me since I felt it was rather aggressive. I came to think of the blue in the painting as the last vestiges of sunlight scattering within the deep subsequently obliterated as the light was sucked out of the air with the setting of the sun. I often think of the relationship of my work to musical structures, and almost always incorporate digital tools in the production of the work. This cross pollination of disciplines and media interest me yet this engagement leads me to frequently ponder what is most effective and engaging aspect of the specific medium of painting. Music is linear and has spatial depth whereas painting can move in all directions on the surface as well as having depth, its non-linear nature embodying a historicism and sense of memory. Music is hot, if you are in a space where sound is present it comes to you whether you want it or not, painting is cool, you must come to it. The perception of music is real-time, and the experience of painting is slow and evolving. While working on the painting I happened to be listening to the Yellow and Green album by Baroness which has a lot of sea and drowning imagery and the title, Sea Lungs, of the painting comes from one of the songs. I commonly refer to the construction of the imagery in my work as orchestration. The layered elements and gestures do not necessarily all mean the same thing nor are they executed in the same way. Some passages are elegant, some are awkward, some are angry, some are sad, some are happy and so on. This heterogeneity of style and content gives the work an emotional resonance that is certainly biased towards a specific statement yet also contains contradictory visual information, making it, in my opinion, an effective model of our relationship to the world.