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I think that's sort of a funny title for this. But I feel like it holds together. These are the last pieces added to Threshold. I am very interested in the negative and positive space that these figures or sense of organic shapes create. I am also quite aware of how they not only function in space, but also how they are a continuation of the same idea, seen in the Bride. I am highly interested in how we perceive things and how we 'see' things through our eyes and through the idea of how the light filters into the aperture of a camera. I am also of course, interested in this idea of memory. And so as I work through an unfocused image, under exposed film strip ( if you will-though these paintings are on canvas) and then slowly through opening the aperture of my 'camera', I clarify the image to the extent that it becomes a focused and readable image. I think of it like sometimes when we read too much or we think too hard, images become fuzzy and we get to a point where we can't do it anymore.
I think memories are similar to that as well. They reside in the recesses of our mind and it is only through a specific event or smell or something that has the 5 senses or is dramatic ( according to the "Art of Memory") that then this creates a stored image or vision of what we think happened in the past. Well I am working from a memory that has that past sensation but also uses a sense of a timelessness, where I intentionally use only white and raw umber and a bit of burnt sienna to create these images. I liken them to a black and white old photograph. One you can handle, and touch and feel-it's not these digital images, there's texture and there's a life that is not digitally manipulated-rather you can see the hand at work-or that process of the hand. I think that's interesting. How do we remember something?Threshold I feel answers that...
I am interested also in that idea of tunnel, fully aware as my mentor asked me, if I knew what tunnels of light connoted, and yes, I realize they mean death, but to me they mean new life as well. I found it interesting that I used a photograph that was of children walking in the woods and coming to a clearing of some kind ( tunnel of light) and then I painted adults in the end. But just before the image becomes completely focused, the fuzzy heads ( the next to the last painting in the series) seem very childlike in their proportions and very much like little children standing, hand in hand together. I intentionally used 13 to realize that even though 13 does have the connotation of death, I think it also means new life. There are 13 small canvas that are here. And also death is a threshold, so is new life, so is the stereotypical idea of marriage or being a couple or going from 'one' to 'two'-that kind of idea-commitment, promise...whatever. And so those were intentional as I was creating this. For me, I think of it this way, a new born is the same as an elderly person dying, only one comes one way and the other goes the other way. And that's how I see it-as a cyclical existence that weaves the fabric of reality in such a way that I don't think we need to 'fear' death or find ourselves only at the moment of joy and bliss at 'new beginnings'. I think death, resurrection ( like re-remembering memories) are like new life. Probably, no one will quite get that far. But those are my thoughts and to me, life is life, death is death, and between them is the coin that separates them. I think of it as life and death are two different sides of the same coin and that in between is where Threshold exists. mc
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