This painting tends to confuse people (which is my goal) so I thought that an explanation
(from my point-of-view) is necessary.
A brief history of this painting...
I began it in the summer of 1988, almost 20 years ago.
This is one of my first oil-on-canvas paintings, if not the first. Prior to this painting, I had
spent nearly a year creating a series of marker-on-paper drawings characterized by line
and color compositions (See the first and
second non-figurative paintings for examples). This painting
was to be just a jump from marker-on-paper to oil-on-canvas, but it turned out to become a
little more than that...in fact, it became a test bed on which I would try new ideas. To
this date I do not consider it finished. In fact, the image shown in this page
is an older version. I have since done more work on it. This painting keeps
evolving just as I do. Click here to view some details.
At first I called it "Underwater Fantasy" because the patterns and colors were very peaceful
and soothing which reminded me of water. But as I worked on it, the patterns created by the
lines and colors began to converge into a unity with which I began to identify more and
more. "If my spirit is to have color and form, this is how I would like it to be", I thought.
We have become so accustomed of thinking of faces when we see the word "portrait" that we
forget that in fact a face is just a pattern, and a partial pattern at best, of a global one that we recognize as a person. This painting is also a partial portrait, just like the partial patterns of my voice, my gait, and my handwriting are also partial portraits. These things let others recognize me. I suppose that in this sense then, all of my paintings are
in the end, self portraits.
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