Still Life

Painting holds powerful keys for creating the totality of the moment. The first powerful key is light. Outdoors and indoors, light is always changing, and it is always transforming everything. Light has no respect for edges, but replaces the borders between nouns and spaces with the border between light and shadow. Different at every moment, light is always performing this labor of dividing and reassembling, reuniting in light or shadow forms previously separated by edges.

Geometry, painting’s second powerful key, collaborates with light’s work of transformation. Geometry makes every shape— light shapes, shadow shapes, shapes of form and shapes of  emptiness— excite every other shape. The way this rhythm of flat, separate shapes creates a unity of space and distance remains a daily miracle to me.

Painting’s third powerful key is metaphor. Like light and geometry, metaphor transforms every noun and space in a painting by connecting them all to each other and to us. Their relationships become our relationships; their stories, our stories. This too, seems miraculous: in addition to the amazing fact of things being themselves, they are also constantly becoming us.