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POTENTIAL IMAGES
The ”Potential Image” paintings are a further excavation into the ”Dynamics o f Nature” paintings that I started nearly twenty years ago while living in Los
Angeles. After what struck me as a short-sighted and dangerous response to September 11, I found that nothing I could paint had any significance to me. For four months, in a state of deep gloom, I painted
over my paintings: old work, new work” sometimes even finished paintings that came back from my galleries. Disillusioned with the world, I was also disillusioned with the image. All that was left
to me was the method, and I found myself experimenting with different mediums and ways of applying paint. I began to mix wax and resin in my paint and used tools from the hardware store like rollers and
trowels, applying paint like plaster. As the world grew darker with greed and political corruption, the surfaces became more interesting and suggestive. With parts of the old paintings coming through, the
surfaces took on a wonderful sensuality. They weren’t quite paintings yet, but the process was starting to pull me out of my despair into a new excitement. I longed to combine some of my previously
developed ”nature language” with these new surfaces.
For a year I followed this dim and uncertain path, until at last I centered on the subject of healing. But what is it that heals? I believe that, for this time of stress and
fear in the world, healing lies in Nature, the wilderness or wildness that contains the natural world. Suddenly, at 4 a.m. one morning, there was no more time for depressing thoughts, only for action. I
wanted to bring everything into this work: brushes, rollers, and all kinds of tools; waxes, oil, and resin. Many of my past loves – such as Chinese painting, graphic design, drawing, and satellite
photography – seemed to be playing a part in the genesis of this new work.
As I worked, the painting tools fell away to the use of my hands. In some of the paintings I used my abstracted nature language, hinting at landscape with rocks, water, and
clouds. Each painting seemed to open the door a little further into a new land, and the surfaces became even more interesting, sometimes like polished leather. The paint began to speak in an elemental
language; as with the Great Mother Earth, the patterns of macro to micro are very much the same. I was starting to find the language of fire, water, wood, and clouds. And as when we look at clouds, we
often see figurative shapes emerging, that visual language is the beginnings of form. Willingly or not, the ambiguousness of the paintings takes hold of the imagination and puts it to work. I think of
the painting as a verb, playing and dancing on the edge of chaos; it does not become a noun until actively viewed by a viewer.
In an age when everything moves faster and faster, and everything is spelled out for us, my desire is to slow down, to explore suggestion rather than statement. I paint these
canvases almost like automatic writing, pleasurably using this language of ambiguity and indeterminacy, walking the line between figurative and absolute abstraction, in order to nurture and activate the imagination.
Paul Pascarella, 2003
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