“Organic grids, psychic notations, invented scripts.”
I think of these marks as a kind of writing that carries the memory of writing forward, a language without fixed meaning but with the capacity to hold experience.
The paintings grew out of the experience of walking the fields in Bovina through the spring and summer. I returned to the same paths again and again, yet the landscape was never the same. The hay grew tall, birds nested and migrated, green grasses turned golden, and eventually the fields were cut. Different birds arrived, those that circled overhead. Strawberries in June to the sound of bobolinks. Orange salamanders and ghost pipes in July. Fairy circles formed by mushrooms and butterflies then the explosion of penny toads on the trails. Late August brought an eruption of purple. The changing landscape following a larger seasonal order, a rhythm of growth. The experience was labyrinthine in that the steps became ritualized and my mind relaxed.
Certain places along the way became sites for reciprocal offerings : first the crossroads, then particular large stones whose forms suggested the heads of snakes. Nagas. One of these contained a cave, a small opening in the landscape that, after repeated visits, began to feel less like a cave and more like a spaceship. At the pond, two of these stone heads formed a uterus of water, creating another threshold within the landscape. These places became coordinates within the walks, points where the ordinary landscape opened into something more mysterious.
The studio became another site within this circuit. What happened in the fields, at the stones, and at the pond, was carried back into the studio and channeled into the paintings.
The looping line pattern became a way of giving visual form to this phenomenon. I hope they read as warm and alive, like organic coils conducting energy, or a weaving of frequencies. They operate somewhere between drawing, writing, textile, and field recording.
I think of “Indra’s Net”, the Vedic image of an infinite jeweled net of the cosmos, in which every jewel reflects every other jewel. Each mark in these paintings is similarly both individual and part of a larger field.