Random Pastoral Aerials

Random Pastoral Aerial #3: Flows and fissures
oil and mixed-media on panel
2007
3' x 2'

Random Pastoral Aerial #4: Pools and micro-climates
oil and mixed-media on panel
2007
3' x 2'

These aerial paintings explore my relationship to sites of city and country and to a "naturalized" view of the human imprint (in this case, agricultural) on the landscape. Like most of my work, these pieces play with ways of knowing a landscape: either through a sequenced / time-based relationship (as in walking, one foot / image in front of the other) or a spatial, holistic and mapped view. The aerials would be the mapped view. The ideas were nuanced by personal experiences (moving back to Appalachia from Los Angeles) and the loss of my imagined relationship to "the country" from afar.

These aren't paintings in the usual sense as I used processes more akin to fiber dyeing than to mark-making or brush-work. First, I allowed the paint to move about on the panel in response to my controlled motions (similar to what I'd discovered earlier with dyeing and staining raw canvases). With this process, images emerge that are simultaneously random and patterned as with other dendritic forms. Upon seeing such forms emerge, the process made it easy for me to imagine I was as much a force of nature governed by physical parameters as a collection of trees, a leaf or a city like Los Angeles. My movements and thoughts constructed the same forms as a branching tree, a forking river, a vine of ivy, a clump of blood vessels, an interstate freeway system or a cancer.

Second in the process, I deliberately filled-in the spaces created between the randomness. This way of working was very deliberate and opened the pieces up to choice, patterns and a different form of repetition.

I found the relationship between the precision and the fluidity to be meaningful during that time of transition. In fact, I find this work to be very personal as it reveals my thought processes and struggles at a time when I was trying to re-situate myself in a location that (in nostalgic recollection) I had believed to be familiar and, yet, was so utterly different than the city which I'd become accustomed and whose streets and freeways I knew so intimately.