important windows at night

In transit, 1999, 96 x 60 inches
Acrylic, spray paint, varnish and metallic powder on board
(the diamond shapes are shiny silver and show up best as you move past the painting - I didn't use a professional photographer in those days)

This is quite a striking painting at 8 feet tall! It was bought from my degree show by "Art in Hospitals", an organization that loans art to healthcare facilities in Scotland. It is still on show in the Glasgow and Edinburgh area. Good to know that many people are seeing it on a daily basis. Art in hospitals does help, even when you'd rather not be there...most of us have experienced that! There is a LOT of fabulous and very contemporary art in Scottish hospitals (which by the way are "free" to all because healthcare is seen as a basic human necessity...let's not get started on that!)

Anyway, I mentioned in the PLANE posting that I went on to see "the airport terminal window". This happened in 1998 and is one of two pivotal experiences that showed me it was possible to represent several very different circumstances in a single image.

In this painting the diamond shapes are obviously reflections of lights inside the terminal as they recede into the distance (we know it is a public place - few houses have that configuration and quantity of lights). There is also a vertical stripe of darkness, as if there is a shadowed area or wall reflected in the window. There are drips and runs... rain on the outside of the glass. Then there are rounded light shapes that seem to be beyond all of this - they represent the world of the airport outside. So several circumstances are indicated by the images layered on top of each other. Because we understand it as a window, we are familiar with what it is representing.

This translated into framing mechanisms and barriers in night scenes after my MFA (Riverside Walk featured in an earlier post, for example). Then when I came to the USA, the idea that layers of separate origin and inference could be meaningfully compressed into a single image started to offer possibilities within "abstract" work, opening up investigation of visual conventions themselves.

We are familiar with images that operate via ONE visual convention - optical reality is a visual convention, for example, its how we see things as we walk around. A map, a diagram, an architectural plan, are all separate (though related) visual conventions - ie we understand on what basis information is represented, what that coded information is telling us. The airport window combined several visual codes, accessible because we are familiar with its realism. Other combinations are possible.

This is not a new idea - David Salle, James Rosequist, Robert Rauschenberg, Sigmar Polke - spring immediately to mind as mixing visual conventions. Currently it is actually the basis (in various subtle ways) of contemporary artists' work such as Sarah Morris, Rebecca Morris, Mary Temple, even Olafur Eliasson, where the old abstract ideas are played on but used very differently. (Some of these have featured on my other blog). We all find our own pathways to similar destinations...