Years ago my grandmother completed a paint-by-numbers kit of Jesus as the Good Shepherd, and it hung in my grandparents home amongst a room of treasured mementos that included family photos, rosaries, and WWII memorabilia. I photographed it one morning, marveling at how even when blurred to an extreme it remained iconic. After my grandmother died I created this work to remind me of the sanctity that resides in the work of our hands.
Fear Not, Neither Be Afraid
toner, acrylic, metallic leaf, and wax on panel
23” x 19” - 2011
| I haven't walked an Oregon beach in years and not run across at least one sandy and picked-over carcass of a duck, gull or fish. And the young growth along the floors of our forests seem half supported not by soil, but by the rotting nurse logs that have fallen victim to wind, water, disease, or some combination thereof.
A retired Forest Service employee, during a recent tour of the area around Sitka, used the tongue-in-cheek term morticulture to speak to the abundant life that takes residence in the decaying carcasses of trees. Regardless of the term used, the truth is inescapable: nature is as much a culture of death as it is of life. They are inextricably linked and the distancing effects of technology and culture do nothing to alter this. Once you step into any meaningful interaction with the landscape all of this becomes very apparent. You begin to not just analyze how the passing of life begets other life, but also consider where you fit into the present web: how you are consuming and (chillingly) how you might be consumed.
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There is no shortage of precedent for glorifying death with the luster of gold. Above is one small work in progress that nods to that convention even as humanity is completely removed from the honorific.
Another memento mori on its merry way toward an end I can't quite visualize yet. Just a few days ago it looked like this. . .
Right now I'm just allowing this to be a reactive sort of process- with decisions made as they often are in life, in the wake of other decisions, some of which are good and some less so. You can try to whitewash certain elements, or perhaps scrape them away, with the hopes of starting fresh but ultimately some trace of what has come before always remains.
For those who know me well my inchoate foray into the memento mori genre will come with little surprise on the decline of 2012. It is a theme that somehow seems more relevant now that I'm a bit older-- less saturated with the laughable melodrama that infused so many early works of art when New Wave Goth and Anne Rice novels seemed like fine company any time I was without a girlfriend.
Which might be more candor than you're really seeking here.
So, with regards to the memento pictured above, you are seeing a work that is very much in progress. A diptych created from two reclaimed canvases over a decade old, with the left being leafed in silver and awaiting an image from the hillsides that make up Cascade Head. The skull is derived from a photograph I took in France many years ago. It rests atop a bit of IKEA fabric that has been thoroughly permeated with powdered graphite.
Last weekend included a foray to the Oregon Coast; a place that never fails to incite the imagination with its majestic combination of meteorological atmospherics and geologic drama. Like every other visitor to Cannon Beach I succumbed to the dynamic magnetism of Haystack Rock, but I did not allow it to blind my camera to nature's other realities.
Here then is an utterly unencumbered picture of death the likes of which only a nature outside of human sentiment can conjure.
