Here is a painting I made in 2003. It involves the usage of strips of canvas, spray paint, charcoal, as well as, both, acrylic and oil paints. This painting represents the beginnings of my experimentation in the usage of multi-mediums. Up to the point when I moved to Nebraska in 2000, I had always been a strict traditional artist in the sense that oil is to be used on canvas and pen and ink on paper.
I started questioning the boundaries of standardized traditions within art such as the above after a year or two of living in Nebraska. One would think that by moving to the Midwest, my imagination would be reduced. This presumption was totally false however, as the time, space, and resources afforded to me in this situation allowed my imagination to explore more than I ever had before.
A Pond In Which Nuclear Glass Broke is a depiction of alternate realities in space being expressed as shattered glass. So it’s as if the explosions of cosmic creation happened, not only by nuclear explosions as we understand them, but also by fractures and fissures in medium of space and time itself. I used the word nuclear to convey the idea of radiation from stars and galaxies, and glass as a way to visualize space and time as mediums.
I likened a portion of the imagined universe for which I was peering into as a subject for this painting as a pond. You may remember some of my paintings pertaining to The Universal Pond. The Universal Pond was a painting I made in high school that looks like a simple three dimensional cartographical view of underwater life underneath a water planet. While there is no horizon in this painting, as there is in The Universal Pond, it still bears similarities in the colors used—blue—as well as the pieces and shapes used.
Art of eVan 