Spirits and Particles

I thought I’d post this painting now since it’s getting near to Halloween 2013. I finished this painting back in 2004. I figured it would be a good painting to show online with my online galleries because it’s sort of a darker theme that has owls flying around in it.

Back in 2004, I had been imagining an idea I liked to call the “mud-ball planet.” I had been having some dreams of exploring the surfaces of other planets like a satellite, and watching the landscapes and oceans move over time. It almost sort of seemed like a complex computer program or something.

I wanted to give life to this idea of a mud-ball planet, or a planet constructed on living mud. It has associations with potters and sculptors, and how they work with the earth’s clay. And of course the western Bible depicts humans as being creatures constructed from the earth by God.

I put a lot of mixed media into this painting. I integrated some sticks and pebbles from the dirt road next to our farm, and I also pasted some of my old torn up underwear as texture to add to the primed canvas. It’s mostly an oil painting, but I was starting to experiment with layers of different media underneath the final structuring and painting of the idea.

While in the process of creation, I found many situations of synchronicity where the randomness of all the layers of texture sometimes coincided with the design I would superimpose onto the prepared picture plane thereafter. There’s also some burlap from an old sack that I incorporated into this painting.

This idea reemphasizes the reality that our world is not, nor is any world, really flat. We go about our days living in a flat world, hardly ever looking up into the sky. The fact that I said “looking up” is a relative frame in itself. Why can’t it be that you are actually looking down into the sky? After all, the world is round, and constantly revolving.