New Work: Internal Landscapes

So I started something new. Yeah, I've got a couple of animal portraits progressing slowly through the grisaille process, and needed something a bit more spontaneous to do for balance. And I've been thinking alot lately about what is necessary for something to be art, particularly the element of deliberate communication. I began to wonder about painting not from a specific location as in plein air, but from a specific text. My first thought was that I didn't want to just take a descriptive passage from a myth or Bible story or work of fiction. I wanted to dig a little more into what communication is. We use words in language as the smallest unit of concept, and assemble them into larger units, sentences and paragraphs, statements and phrases, poems and essays and diatribes and pleas, much as atoms are assembled into molecules, compounds, proteins, carbohydrates, crystals, etc. What if I took the "molecules" of a text as the locations for a series of landscapes? I found this poem by Robert Frost:

FIRE AND ICE

Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I've tasted of desire

I hold with those who favour fire.

But if it had to perish twice,

I think I know enough of hate

To say that for destruction ice

Is also great

And would suffice.

I broke it into a series of pieces or textual molecules, for example: "Some say" and "the world will end" and "in fire".

Here is "Some Say".

In thinking about these two words together, I recognized that they are used conversationally to imply a level of ambiguity and distance, rather than stating "I think" or "The facts are", we use them to introduce some idea while leaving room for doubt. There are choices, options, and some say this, and some say that. "Some Say" is 16"x12", acrylic on stretched canvas, and in the 'living with it to see if it is really finished stage'. Stay tuned for subsequent pieces. I'll be adding a new gallery to my website for these paintings, and will post the titles/pieces of Mr. Frost's poem, in advance, in case you are curious about how I've chosen to disassemble its component textual molecules.