Lately, I have been visiting art museums and galleries in London and thinking about the history of art, and the practice of painting. Long before I visited this month, I had been thinking about the difference between a work of material and a photo of a work of material.
A purely digital work does not offer many clues to the emotional or physical intentions of the artist.
If you look at a John Constable oil painting, and compare its greens and natural hues to a Gainsborough oil painting, you see that one of them, the latter, seemed to paint to the specifications of the elite. The other, the former, painted to document the whims and truth of nature.
In the digital environment, I wanted to make something, and then be able to document the truth of the physical manifestation of the process. Therefore, in applying gesso, oil paints with brush strokes, I needed to break up the methodology and burn it.
In doing so, I damaged the work, but also marked the work with something that cannot be felt digitally.
Therefore -- and I hope this is not too verbose -- it became important to leave as it stands the "natural" process of the art's creation.
Some may look at this and see it as an experiment. I saw it as a way of telling the truth.
For Shore Borne
London, England
August 1, 2023