I've started a new series called Transcendence, and I thought I'd explain more about it!
I'm exploring a new and different technique and way of mixing my paints for this series, and one of the key visual elements of the series is the prominent negative space. I also use a palette knife to add line elements and I mix the paint in such a way that encourages the background color to pearl through and swallow up some of the color. This paint mixture is much thinner and more fluid than what I use in most of my other work, and that allows the texture of the canvas to come through a little bit, which I love.
This series is all about the glimpses of beauty and transcendence through the mundane and the physical. It's about seeing the timeless and eternal truth and beauty through the noise of what is temporary. The life of the spirit in the midst of the life of the body. It's about the beautiful things that show through the cracks of daily life if we have eyes to see them.
I've always found myself drawn to images related to this idea: bare branches in the foreground with beautiful blue sky or blazing sunset behind, tiny new sprouts coming up through the earth in early spring, the sparkling water of the stream behind my house, barely visible through the timber. I've been playing with variations on all those images in various ways, but in this series I've been working with an abstraction of the idea behind what draws me to images like that.
Through the Cracks
Through Fog
Time Between Times
In ancient Celtic Britain, the "time between times" was a concept of the twilights, dawns, and season changes being something other, something special. They were seen as special moments when two times overlap and blur together, sort of "both but neither" times. They believed that those moments were somehow transcendental and even supernatural. I think many of us feel a sense of that in those times, like a veil is lifted for just a moment and we can catch a glimpse of something beautiful, like time stops for a beat and we have eyes to notice a depth that we often miss.
Through the Frost
Behind the Veil