A new painting: Only in dark, the light.
Moonscape with Box
21”X 17” unframed
Oil on canvas, 2024
Recently I’ve been thinking about darkness. By darkness I mean a few things. First, the despair I feel when I think about the recent political events and what's to come, the darkness of not knowing but having a sense of it, fighting fear and fighting the feeling of being helpless to change it.
I’m also thinking of the darkness before the return of the light as the winter solstice draws near (read here- hope). The painting Moonscape with Box is a study of all this, the moon shining down on a wintery scrubland, silent and barren. In this painting I think of the box as the limitless mind and imagination. The objects in the box are wool from a lost Japanese sheep, a wing, and a celestial stone. Let me explain more, and also reference a hero of mine, the writer Ursula K. Le Guin.
Only in silence the word,
only in dark the light,
only in dying life:
bright the hawk's flight
on the empty sky.
-Wizard of EarthSea, 1968
There's so much about darkness and light in her work, often informed by the Tao Te Ching, which she translated in 2019. Probably my all time favorite quote below, Le Guin captures the power of the mind and imagination to shift our collective reality:
“We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art.”
Excerpt from Ursula K Le Guin's speech at National Book Awards
About the frame
These images are from the wood shop of Kelly Best, an incredibly talented artist and woodworker who is also based in Berkeley, California.
He created a platform style frame for this painting made out of unfinished redwood. Kelly explains how this style of wood work, smoothly sanded, without finishing oil or varnish, was seen more commonly in the 1960s and 70s. It’s a warm, chalky brown, the same color that glows through the earth tones of the underpainting.
I came to him with a question. Usually I default to a floating frame, flush with the face of the painting or no frame at all. Personally, I love seeing the sides of a great painting, showing all the evidence of the surface built up over time, the finger prints of the artist, the paint marks and smudges and even the dirt from moving around in the world. But not everyone loves this.
Is there a way to show at least a little bit of the sides of the painting? This piece has many paintings underneath it, the layers of paint built up over years in the studio. Every layer has been sanded carefully, especially the face where it meets the sides, until it has the richness of a sort of dense chocolate cake, the kind with a satiny black shell (you know what I mean?) where meets the raw canvas on the side of the piece. I don’t want to lose this.
In response he said, “look, I’ll make the back variable so you or whoever else can adjust it to reveal as much or as little as you like.“ So this piece is an experiment in that sense. I’m so happy about the way it turned out.
