Within You & Without You

Media: oil & mastic on canvas

Location: Destroyed

50 x 36 inches / 127 x 91 cm

Every one of us has experienced, in dreaming, or daydreaming, or perhaps in poetry, imaginary ways of seeing a narrative. There are connections between things and aspects of our lives that cannot be well described rationally, a kind of beauty that doesn't usually appear in our day-to-day consciousness, except by surprise, but that provides a different and equally important way of perceiving our lives. These impressions may be sparked anew, like a déja vu, by imagery that resonates in that same archetypal way. It’s important to remain aware of this other way of seeing, this language of the imagination; it helps us to expand the way in which we live, because the definitions by which we live are themselves the product of the cultural imaginary.

I had been working on combining images that would create a space that nurtures you, like the feeling of curling up with a book in a window alcove. I was following Lévi-Strauss’s theory that our first perception of the outside world is from the crook of our mother’s arm… first of her nipple, and then of her arm, and her lips, and then something else beyond her arm… and so on. So that sets us up for looking for nooks or viewpoints that mirror that memory space, like the way a landscape artist will frame a view with a branch of leaves curving overhead, and its shadow below.

I was fascinated by the way two or three layered images - say an interior, the corresponding exterior and a third detail - could create through their new composition a virtual space, an implied space, with an implied narrative. And then, looking for something to give more life to a painting with a silhouette going down the stairs, I tried for the first time in a long while to put a face-forward figure in the painting. The silhouette is only cerebral, compared to a fully present person, and there are so many ways that you can lose that virtual, surreal sense if you add a figure in realist rendering, but I needed more, and it was for an open doorway facing the silhouette. I lucked out; the image I found was of a young girl glancing back and it talked to the silhouette in the foreground, implying perhaps the same woman in two stages of her life.

Then I tried to take it to the next step, and I did this painting with two doorways, or one for sure and the second one is the door that’s facing us with a mirror that shows the reflection of the woman who is just a slip of a shadow in the foreground… a silhouette of someone who’s gone. So, with the girl in the doorway, it’s three stages of a woman’s life.

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For those of you with low vision:

This is a tall rectangular painting with a large trunk of a sycamore tree in a nave of sunlit yellow and green leaves with a part of a shingled house behind it, and a green checkerboard floor below, that’s behind a sun-dappled picket fence at the foot of the painting. Other elements determine its impact. It is infused with the yellow light that colors the leaves above and the sandy soil of the ground plane that becomes the checkerboard floor. Prominently, a bathroom sink with mirror cabinet appears against the tree trunk, next to the back of an open door that encloses a nook with the tree trunk. On that door is a mirror that reflects the sink and the head and hands of a woman bending over the sink. Seen just behind the door, and in front of the shingled house beyond it, is an open doorway out to a brightly sunlit lemon yellow, with a screen door held open by a young girl in surfer shorts and bare feet. The lines of that screen door echo the line-up of the sink and it’s reflection in the mirror, which are amplified by the geometry of the checkerboard floor to draw your eye into the painting. Almost every surface is dappled with light; even to the streaks of reflection on the bathroom mirror. The way the girl’s door opening into the sunlight is layered with the shingle house and its porch makes it seem that it’s all one space, all of it, from the picket fence on back to the house and beyond.