The Window Series: Revisited

So why suddenly paint windows? It’s really not that much of a departure from my water and night images, it is seeing two places simultaneously although neither give up all their mystery. The viewer is forced to explore their own memories of different places without all the secrets being laid out by the artist. There is something that haunted me about the image I paint or soothed me and I leave it to the viewer to derive their own feeling from that space.

Viewing through windows is a separation of light and shadow. There are two, very different images that mesh, but never completely unite. I equate it with my water scenes, I want you to be on the surface but realize there is a whole other separate world that you can see but barely decipher. This is what haunts me perhaps that secondary intangible place just outside our reach.

I don’t want to get too philosophical but here it goes, it is my attempt to touch that peripheral feeling that haunts me. The feeling in a dark room where you can’t feel or decipher what is making you uncomfortable but its there. I believe that is what the dark depths of the water, the distance and silence of space, that absence outside the window.

I want to explain the absence and separation of the self, even when surrounded by nature and beauty, there is a lack of tangible feeling of being. It’s a frightening feeling of the self, drifting off into some weightless vague space that you can’t really touch anything or feel solid ground.

This is why I feel like windows seem to be the perfect next step in the explanation of that feeling of separateness and absence. The artist is often the viewer, who often exiles themselves from truly being any part of the scene. While being part of it is not necessary for the artist, there is loneliness and feeling of separation that can get unnerving at times. I paint both of these sides of the window, each derived from a feeling of a need for being one with nature.