Belle Isle Fantasia

When the pools of colour had finally dried I turned over this piece of plexi to see if I had captured anything worthwhile in the randomly, almost blindly applied colour swaths.

The central swirl of raw, savage, ruthless colour, and shapes, and visual texture were immediately captivating and seemed laden with a very intense meaning … and, in a curious manner, demanded an archeological process of excavation, of examination of layers of thought and association, through which I would discover what this attempted piece of art really meant.  It’s akin to becoming a writer in order to figure out what you think.

The most immediate suggestion was of something apocalyptic.  Also, there was something true in feeling to my own local, very northern landscape and sky, which could at times be as fierce and as unsympathetic as the imagination says Tierra Del Fuego is in its even more distant southern exposures. This explosive sensational fantasia soon morphed into a glimmer, a patina, a shimmer of local history, of how shattering the culture inflicted on the area’s indigenous folk a millenia ago when Vikings descend upon them in northern Newfoundland: alien wayfarers; alien technology; alien behaviours; new, and very unfriendly notions of rivalry and of ownership of local resources; searchers for loot and booty to trade in Europe—in short, nothing short of a localized apocalypse.

But the image, at that point, didn’t yet have its Jupiter-like ring and wheeler/dealer orbiter moons: in this case the elliptical outer orbit of yellow-blue-orange-red-black.  Nor yet, in its lower right edge, the suggestion of any island.  The message was clear from the painting itself: it already knew most of what it wanted to trade in for its endgame definition.  My task would be to discover and resolve how to fulfill the needs of the core image, as it was not yet visually complete.

With coloured, torn-edged paper circles I explored for the exact placement of where these controllers ought to be, how to size, re-compose and stabilize the orbiters, and of which colour to specifically place where.  A slow and careful exploration eventually revealed a near pitch-perfect solution.  The outlines of the ragged forms were pencilled, and then slowly, carefully, very carefully, excavated from the back surface until clear of colour except where the original image needed to remain intact.  Then the five new shapes could be and were painted in.  The painting, however, remained incomplete until I recognized that a well-placed island would increase contrasting depths, imply greater reality, and lock everything into place.

Then it was that this painting confirmed my own definition of triumphant abstract: specific reality-bound content, specific intensity of feeling, spatial depth, dazzling colour: all achieved in the contemporary context of materials; and all in free, yet also highly controlled,  collaboration with accident: one might say—a contemporary understanding of how to meet life on the problem solving terms it offers, in fact demands of us.