Job Search

I have been digging around looking for something I can use to apply for another teaching job. I found these paintings. They are from 2004, the year I began teaching. They are studies from a trip to Provence. I started a series of larger, collage constructed canvases, but never got to finish them. I lost my studio space.

I lost the thread of purpose in these pieces as I struggled to learn to teach painting. I have been teaching for three years, graduate school for two...
I can't see my work any more.
I do work for graduate school, that I exhibit and work I do that comes from the joy of painting...for me... and that is the work that seems remote.

These pieces are 10" x 10", stretched canvas. They are encaustic. To me they are little icons, stylized images of the scale of the cultivated French landscape. They are from sketches I did on a bus traveling 45mph along country roads outside Aix on the way to Arles. The color is more about the memory of lavender, the impossible blue of the French sky and the way it excites the yellowing bean plants. Mt St Victoire. I succumbed to the spell of light and color.

When I critique student work, I ask, where are you in this painting? How do you get in? It is a concept that they don't ask themselves.
Looking at my work, there is a distortion of perspective because I am about 10' above the ground on this giant bus.

We are so used to seeing images that are taken from unusual heights, cameras in the air and telescopic lenses that we forget that as artists, we are always asking the viewer to let go of gravity. Forget about walking into the Last Supper, it can't be done.

These are the kinds if things that wake me up.

We experience the world from eyes at whatever height they happen to be. Our vision is homogenized into ideas about what we see. We enter a visual world self-mediated by previous experience, narratives of belief, memory, dreams. We begin to project and fill in the blanks before we allow ourselves to identify what is actually seen.

Legerdemain.

We might allow space for skepticism.