The Spaces Between: Thoughts on the New Paintings

Since August, I’ve been working on a series of paintings for the 930 Gallery in Louisville.  Originally the show was to center on the theme macrocosm/ microcosm: the greater universe the miniature worlds it comprises. To generate images for the show, I spent inordinate amounts of time on the Internet printing and then drawing neurons and nebula, embryos and birthing suns.  As with any painting project, the final product bears little more than a tangential resemblance to the original inspiration; if you’ll bear with me, I need to retrace my steps and discover where these three unusual works came from and what I meant by them.

A few Christmases ago, while on our annual post-Thanksgiving family shopping day at the Beaver Creek mall, Dad and I hid the bookstore under pretense of shopping and fortuitously stumbled on an anthology of Hubble Telescope photographs. While looking at one of pictures of a nebula, I made the offhand comment that if you crossed your eyes a bit and tried to forget what you were looking at, the texture of the nebula was almost identical to that of neurons seen under a microscope. Thankfully, Dad saw the possibilities in the idea and bought the book for me as my Christmas gift.  (So, thank you, Dad, for the book that made this show possible.)

I kept the book in my studio for two years, occasionally flipping through its pages to wink my eyes at the images, trying to trick my mind into recognizing the cellular in the interstellar. When it comes to my understanding of macro and micro, distinctions collapse: both are equally baffling. I wanted to make images that invoked that kind of wonder, paintings that visually captured the mystery of the profoundly expansive and the profoundly minute by making them look one and the same.  In practical terms, this means that when confronted with a successful painting, you would find yourself asking, “So, is it a brain cell or a burning sun?”  Ideally, you would eventually stop caring and just be absorbed by the beauty of the paint: you’d be in left to wonder at the mystery of things science often tricks us into thinking we understand.

None of these things happened.

My skills weren’t up to the vision, and halfway to the show deadline I woke up to find myself on auto-pilot, illustrating pictures that would look great in a sixth grade astronomy textbook but that did not stand on their own as significant works of art.  I was bored. I was uninspired. I was frantic. And I was plagiarizing from NASA.

                                

                                      (above: me in studio, close to the cracking point)

To remedy the situation, I fell back on another idea that had been gestating while I worked, a concept that could be easily translated to the canvas. I stretched masking tape across the bottom of a panel I was working on, painted the space below a solid burgundy black. In seconds I had a horizon.

The word horizon denotes the apparent boundary between the earth and the sky. We also use it as a term to describe the limit of perception, knowledge, and skill. For me, these two definitions conflate in the landscape drawings of children.

Have you ever seen a child draw a picture in which the ground constitutes a green bar of scraggly crayon on the bottom of the page and the sky, a blue streak of crayon across the very top? For whatever reason, this child conceives of ground and space as separate entities that do not touch—the sky is above and the ground is below and between you find the white space not of sky but of a total blank: she cannot comprehend what lies between the meeting of the concrete and the abstract. 

While painting from my book of Hubble telescope pictures, I couldn’t resist the fact that each image had an edge: the page cut off after six inches of infinity.  And what a mercy; how could we stand to see more? Similarly, the jungle we see under the microscope is contained within the circular halo of the lens.  The boundary is drawn: we are given a window, but our view is limited, and everything we learn only further reveals the depth of our ignorance.  

As a gesture towards my original vision for these paintings, each contains a central figure or image that in some way mimics the infinite or the infinitesimal. The black blanks that frame the image represent the horizon: the edge of the page that precedes the edge of canvas, the blank spaces of a child’s drawing that reveal limits of knowledge:

                    

This horizon is the juxtaposition of the concrete and the infinite, where the ground we walk on kisses the vacuum. You can drive all night along this horizon and never catch it, but you can get on your knees, press your hand to your carpeted living room floor, and have in hand the intersection between earth and space.  

These paintings are on display with the work of Mitch Eckert, Michael Koerner, Gabrielle Mayer, and James Michael Starr at the annual Cultivate Beauty Exhibit hosted by the 930 Gallery in Louisville, Keucky. The work will be up from March 26th through May 3rd.

 

 

Comments

[Walt Pierce]

Ummmmmm!

Grandpa Pierce

[Mark Pierc]

Bethany! I love the new works. Wish I could see them up close. Hope you have a GREAT show! Uncle Mark

[Mark Pierce]

Bethany - Thought you'd like to know that I linked this post over on my blog this morning. Check it out at www.churchrequel.com. Uncle Mark

[Dad]

Glad to know that things are still juxtaposed. Very comforting. Love, Dad