With a new year upon us, I wanted to start the first of the year with an artwork that has come to define my progress as an artist in 2016. The artwork was a long process full of stymied moments and second-guessing, and so well fits the turbulent and revealing year.
In this artwork are elements of influences from world histories, some that stretch from many millennia ago up to this day in time, and which reveal certain ideals about humanity and its identity problem. This includes the woven histories of geometry, art-making, color-theory, but more importantly shows an important desire to find a common ground that all people can identify with.
1. History
It is hard to know your own past. In attempts to catch sight of the swiftly passing days, I continuously settle for studying or reading world history and enlightening stories that help put perspective on my own timeline.
Classes in Art Survey has illustrated a particularly charming history of mankind, in its progress towards overcoming mankind's own weaknesses through self-examination. Through the years each new artist uses past techniques and understandings to better explain and understand their contemporary era in comparison, with hopes of learning about themselves on the way.
World Identity:
Not just because I lived in multiple countries does it allow me to identify with those other peoples, but by living in other places I have realized or come to understand that there is in fact a common identity for all of mankind, and that the artist of the world are often the communicators of that relationship.
Non-specific appropriation:
In the art world there is a common census for adopting previous artists' techniques or styles, one where an artist from one culture appropriates traditional or non-traditional styles, but in doing this takes it out of the original context and uses it in a new way. As a wider context, that artist is learning from the knowledge that that world heritage has to offer from other cultures not of his/her origin.
I would suggest that this work of art adopts certain aesthetic qualities from several classic or ancient customs, but appropriated in a way that embraces the cultural unanimity that they share.
a. Islamic Geometries
The first influenced by abstract geometries and patterns, and to relate it to a God or great divine. I find that each line comes to have more purpose, and inevitably numbers and measurement become a basis for structure.
b. Indian Relief Carving
Epic carvings that would span faces of rock found in ruins across the eastern world, relief carving embodies the community it was created for. This work imitates the carved stone impression and flat textured surfaces of masonry, while maintaining the Renaissance tradition of painting in grisaille, imitating stone in monochrome paint, but revealing its true painted nature on the surface.
These techniques are not strict in any manner, instead hold intent to elaborate the van dyke brown prints underneath and encourage the unbiased world traditions of various crafts without making it remind the viewer of one specific custom or another.
c. Greek Frieze
The source of title for this works out of practicality, but also defines the artworks classical acknowledgement to traditional Greek friezes that carried along the facades of walls. Frieze's in particular are art forms that speak to people as a group. It patrons to many people at once as it wraps around the room or wall, and is a steady and repetitive length that seems to explains times perpetual pacing onward.
While this artwork is just past arms length, the geometric patterns in its structure allows additional prints to be added on each side indefinitely.
2. Symbol (Subject)
While the figures/shapes overall are less identifiable and more abstract or non-objective, the Droplet frieze is dominated by one specific symbol.
This droplet shape is composing and composed in the artwork throughout, but never takes precedence of the meaning. It is both ambiguous culturally, and somewhat shared by all. This symbol has been involved in most my my art for several years now, and has become a useful tool in depicting the material or substance that composes our lives as well as the spirit that directs us through that life.
An ambiguous symbol, it can represent the matter and molecules that compose our surroundings, and identifies matter as a mutable thing that can transfer in form. But just as importantly, the droplet represents the spirit or soul of a being, the un-graspable ghost that seems both part of the fabric of reality, yet is ethereal and immeasurable. The spirit like a raindrop falling into the ocean, is absorbed into a mass of spirit, there yet not any where specific.
The droplet identifies this alternating perspective of the body and soul in our reality, how they both compliment each other and cause a duality within us (as individuals and as a whole species.)It is a symbol of unity between matter and spirit, external and internal, and like a droplet of water, both transform and change form.
Details of painted Vandyke brown prints, Click to view closer.
3. Science and Color
In combination with the world identity and droplet symbolism that attempts to shed light on humanity's inability to ignore differences, is this artworks attempts to project an additional perspective incorporating time.
The colors in this artwork follow certain rules that pay homage to a new understanding of reality more aligned with science, but not discouraged by the previous traditions that come through the many years of culture and knowledge through art traditions.
The overall brown color is a common trait to Van dyke brown prints. It uses energy directly from the sun, the single source of vitality on earth, to make an image. The same energy that feeds us, can be used to make a photograph with colors as brown and earthy as the soil.
The brown prints pair exceptionally well with purple, which in ancient chakra traditions as well as western impressions has been the color of ultimate knowledge, spiritual transcendence, and peaceful tranquility.
Redshifting/ Blueshifting
Take a look in the center and you will notice a significant reddening, likewise on the edges is a similar blue-shading. This identifies the last significant understanding that I have come to accept this previous year, one that aligns with contemporary science and understanding of time.
According to special relativity, space and time are interconnected, and when one ones at near the speed of light, times slows down, while your surroundings would appear differently. When you gaze through space-time, the band of colored light is stretched and you would in theory witness your color view change.
Purple is the crucial threshold between the blue-shifing past, and the red-shifting future; purple becomes a point of tranquility in the moment. The string of gresaille droplets seems to stretch along like time, yet change according to your position in space and time. Our position and perspective in time unavoidably has an affect on how we see the present in space.
It is a commentary on how we view time as a span from point A to point B. Many old cultures saw time as cyclical, yet today we see time a chiefly linear. This is the specific paradigm we live in, and our perspectives of our reality are what restrict us.
In this artwork I am trying to see time less as a time-line, and more as a single shared moment, seeing people as under one large world heritage of culture instead of groups of different nations or ethnicities; if we saw art as an attempt at extending our understanding and not just for its visual value, then maybe people would begin to view the world as something close and integrated, not fragile and conflicting.
With that I wish a prosperous and eventful 2017 year! Happy art-making!