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New Painting: Jughandle, Brockengespenst
Aug 28, 2009 — 3 comments
The new painting, Jughandle, is finally finished. It seemed like my mind was constantly being drawn in different directions while I was trying to work on it, so, as with everything else, it took longer than I would have liked to complete. This mountain has been a sort of constant visual presence in my life, it being the looming beast overlooking Payette Lake where my family gathers every year (we’ve actually climbed it, on a few occasions). I’ve always wanted to paint it, but I never thought anything I could come up with would stand a chance against the real thing. Obviously I am right — it can’t — but I figured giving it a shot and paying homage to a personally influential image is better than being afraid and hiding, doing nothing.
I was going for a slight sense of the brockengespenst (David Foster Wallace alludes to it in Infinite Jest, which is apparently an allusion [go here] to Gravity’s Rainbow, a book which I attempted to read but put down after 100 exhausting pages) without the shadow, or more accurately where the mountain, instead of casting the shadow, is itself the shadow.
I’ve also just started work on a cast stone medallion sculpture for the facade of a building. It’s in the embryonic stages now, once it evolves a little further I will post photos of it here.
This is a picture of two steel flange type things on the back of a truck I passed on the highway. There’s something bizarre and fantastic about the shape they formed. I want them in my yard.