Skate Egg Sacs

Skate Egg Sacks 26" x 80", four panels each 26" x 20" watercolor

Viewing and painting piles of stuff that washes up on the beach where I grew up has become a way for me to reduce the importance of the subject matter and focus on sorting and joining the repetitive shapes. Staring into the pile of black shapes recreates Psyche's Labor for me. I give my time to this task in the same spirit as I enter any repetitive task that seems overwhelming, seeing the one and the many, the things that separate, the things that join, the big picture and the small, distinct edges and blurs. I began this series with Morandi in mind, using the repeated viewing of shells, first in sheet and then later in book form. This work has such an element of time in it, with very distinct levels of seeing. My hope was to recreate a surface that would take the viewer in and out of the picture plane as if re-focusing with a camera.

The images themselves seem to remind me of the water shots in Medea by Von Trier. Maybe this is an homage to veils of light. I have arranged them arbitrarily in a row, I had thought of a quilted look, cutting them up into squares and pushing them around. There is an axis in each one, though not pronounced, that hints at my preoccupation with time movement.

I may be putting these in the faculty show for school.. but maybe I will scan them and cut them up more. I will experiment with moving them around first.