This painting entitled Signs on a White Field is about many things at the same time. In this work I am combining several things together: using masking tape and paint to create lines, painting over those lines, and then sanding them down, graphite drawing, ink drawing with a small brush and then on top of that more lines of paint made with masking tape. The ink drawings are made from patterns of mark making that I have been practicing over many years. It is a sort of meditative practice and the marks are meant to depict movement. The graphite lines are referencing architectural drawing, and I use them in an intuitive way to interact with the pattern of sanded lines beneath them. The sanded lines were created using a symmetric pattern that I came up with in a spontaneous way.
Many layers of intuitive mark-making with the hope of making some new meaning out of the combination of each. The architectural and the free flowing organic in the same space create a balance of tension.
The title is a line from Joyce’s Ulysses. After listening to it as an audio-book I gained a great appreciation for it, and felt like I was able to penetrate its deep layers of meaning. James Joyce did wonderful things with language, and I appreciate the stream of consciousness of the characters. Ulysses reads as if one is reading the thoughts inside the character’s mind. Many layers of meaning - in the painting above, and the passage below are not always connected, but seem to make sense.
The line Signs on a white field (which references writing on paper) occurs in the third episode of the book - Proteus, where one of the main characters is walking along the beach. I have included the entire paragraph below for your reading and discovering:
“His shadow lay over the rocks as he bent, ending. Why not endless till the farthest star? Darkly they are there behind this light, darkness shining in the brightness, delta of Cassiopeia, worlds. Me sits there with his augur's rod of ash, in borrowed sandals, by day beside a livid sea, unbeheld, in violet night walking beneath a reign of uncouth stars. I throw this ended shadow from me, manshape ineluctable, call it back. Endless, would it be mine, form of my form? Who watches me here? Who ever anywhere will read these written words? Signs on a white field. Somewhere to someone in your flutiest voice. The good bishop of Cloyne took the veil of the temple out of his shovel hat: veil of space with coloured emblems hatched on its field. Hold hard. Coloured on a flat: yes, that's right. Flat I see, then think distance, near, far, flat I see, east, back. Ah, see now! Falls back suddenly, frozen in stereoscope. Click does the trick. You find my words dark. Darkness is in our souls do you not think? Flutier. Our souls, shamewounded by our sins, cling to us yet more, a woman to her lover clinging, the more the more.