Mountain + Water

      … as soon as there is mountain there is water *

This body of work is generated by ideas of landscape. Landscape as world creating, exemplified in paintings that do not seek to represent particular, framed, observable views, influenced by my thinking about Chinese landscape. The word landscape does not exist in Chinese vocabulary but is understood by the words mountain-water. These paintings are correlations of form and formless (mountain and water) in reciprocal engendering manifesting something of the spiritual. When their materiality settles and disperses the spirit of the landscape arises.

Black and white, ink and brush, quiet and un-calm, thought-things shaped by the emotionality of artistic action. Works structured around order and disorder, the restlessness of heterotopias, harmony and destruction transposed into unrest. This is not all-out war, but there is a sense of a deep crisis and an overbearing feeling of menace, of being faced with enormous threat. The emergence of these images comes together as an elegy referencing Robert Motherwell’s Elegy to the Spanish Republic.

       *The Great Image Has No Form or On the Nonobject Through Painting. Francois Jullien. 2012