06.24.04| as if falling “You're
walking. And you don't always realize it, but you're always falling.
With each step, you fall forward slightly. And then catch yourself
from falling. Over and over, you're falling.” As if falling: not down the proverbial flight of stairs, but as falling into language. Into folk ballads and story-telling traditions. Or the ancient paintings depicting Tibetan monks flying above lunar landscapes. In other words, the process of falling into a new project. Into a new idea. For example: painting exists as a meditative process for me, a reflective free-fall across the landscape of memory. As a result— multiple ideas generate themselves, forming in the back of the head, waiting for the right moment to push up, reveal themselves— often unexpectedly, without warning, while I work on other unrelated projects. Once
in the middle of gathering information for a thesis on the lack
of mythic images in modern society, I found a short folk story called
“Daniel Crowley and the Ghosts,” a psychological drama
written before the 19th Century. The main character, a bachelor
coffin-maker, unwittingly invites a haunting onto himself; he conjures
a wild party of In this case, while reading through the folk-tale I instantly visualized an unfolding storyboard, color schemes following dream-realities: muted colors mixing with heavy shadows and raw textures. However, it was not until this summer, years later, I could begin placing the sequence on paper, hastily sketching the designs, falling into the motion of the story. To date, two paintings have been completed: click here to view project updates.
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ghosts to descend into his house with loud chatter,
clamorous music, furious dancing. The same manner memories rise
unbidden into our conscious mind, swamp us momentarily with an emotion
from the past. The same way inspiration arrives, in the middle of
the night when we lie in bed trying to fall asleep.