Witnessing and the Sublime in Painting
Animals: whales,
domestic or household cats and spiders,
ancient animals
horseshoe crab or coquille saint jacques.
Trees, plants, grass, or bark
My daughter
Hands, backs of heads, a torso
Appliances, fans, microwave
Toys
A Big Fan
Sleeping girl with horseshoe crab on her face on the beach
I am interested in scientific data collection with respect to marine animals, some of whom are reaching extinction numbers. In 2023, I had the idea of making portraits of the whales, believing that portraits validate a singular identity. I began painting whales while researching the online NOAA archives. I liked the idea that it would be difficult or awkward since I had never painted before, perhaps like a scientist. I started by making my painting from other images not as copies but as a form of witnessing (as an artist) a witnessing (that of a scientist), as a form of interpreted testimony.
I would like to relate the concept of the sublime to painting. Sublime as a verb, is active rather than passive, it is a passage with a gap. In chemistry it is a movement that skips over a state of being, from solid to gas. What does the verb sublimate or “to sublime” have to do with the use of the word sublime as a noun when it describes how we relate to seeing, hearing? I would like to argue that the sublime is the state of the witness who has been changed, activated, shifted from a path/thought that was parallel or perpendicular, definitively separate or crossing, to something oblique, questioning, elevated or suspended.
Painting felt very liberating and quickly opened up a world of visual fantasy for me. My compositional method combines and builds relationships between figures, textures and landscapes. Some of these I have witnessed myself, others I have seen in the media. More like daydreams than night dreams, they follow a thought process. What appears are instances or strong images that connect to others, creating a non narrative and yet relatable scene. And the sublime shift is in the work itself, that of putting them together as one artwork. Multiples becoming one, one becoming multiple. Tying my consciousness, my memory to its original vision, the site or sighting of each thing.
The figures in my painting leap into a network of relationships. In this way, I expose my personal world of interconnectedness and fantasy. In many of my paintings we are witnessing someone witnessing. Recreating the sensation of confronting something strange and ambiguous, or of trying to guess what another being is thinking as they watch something. I think this brings forward a kind of trouble of communicating experience, of putting things into words. I often depict humans and animals as turning away or with their eyes closed or hidden. I do not want the viewer to formulate a relationship directly with the subjects in the painting, impose an affect or create a character.
As I continue, I am interested in what happens to surfaces, with respect to the paper and paint but also as a subject of the paintings. How when something is laid upon another thing it changes it. The one thing becomes the landscape of the other or becomes the thing holding it up in the painting. When painting I break down bordered surfaces into their textures, their implicit movement through the brush stroke. Sometimes a surface expands, fans out, swirls or emerges from somewhere giving directional energy. And sometimes the surface is broken up into lines, dashes and separated into parts by borders that are clear, broken or blurry. These are irregular motifs, repetition transforming as it repeats.
