Audience 14 Print

oil pastel on Bristol This series began as a game with my daughter, and developed into a way to practice drawing quickly. I use a very soft, infinitely layerable oil pastel. Some sticks are harder than others. The most sensitive will melt out from between one's fingers and stick to the palette on end. I touch the tip of my finger to the stick and touch the earlier layers as delicately as possible. I break up enormous chunks on the paper, and at other times spread individual grains to where I want them. I draw with others like a crayon. The impastos are very thick. The pastels are awfully fun to use. Turning an audience into the subject(s) and my viewers into the audience tickles me formally. I studied philosophy of perception and when I worked in television I was made aware of a sub-cultural attitude toward images--The Image--that I had not been aware of. I found how we can be viewed at different rates of time; how we sometimes make a fetish of the moment. It made me reflect on the place of photography and commemoration in our lives. It made me think we swim through time and can be viewed that way. I think of moments from À la recherche du temps perdu--one passage especially having to do with how we embody our times and are infused with it. We bear the stamp of the historic moment. In this series I re-create what I'm given with some latitude. I love accidental (but selected) compositions. Some moments remind me of moments from classics. My daughter can see at a much faster rate than I can. Now that she is grown up she works with related images in similar but different ways. We feel applauded after a while having these on our walls.