Emergence
Emergence (Goat Mountain) 2017 | gouache on paper | each 24" x 18"
October 29, 2017
The Emergence series consists of eight landscapes painted from photos I took in and around Big Bend National Park and Big Bend Ranch State Park, plus numerous smaller studies. Using the concept of geological change as a metaphor for personal growth, the paintings intentionally straddle the line between naturalism and something that exists just outside of that. The stylistic rendering varies across the paintings and sometimes within a single painting as a way to visually suggest a process that is in constant flux, sometimes smooth and sometimes disjointed. The colored shapes are a breaking off point, at first embedded within the rugged rock faces and their dark shadows before floating independently upwards and transforming the seemingly unalterable land and sky around them.
The idea came from a short but memorable trip to Big Bend in July of 2016, the same trip that inspired the Candor series and when I took the base photo for the 10-panel piece Universe. I was there to learn astrophotography and was driving through the national park at night, the darkness of the skies blanketing the hills with almost inscrutable blackness. The shapes suddenly appeared, emerging from the rocky hills. By "appeared" I don't mean that there were literal colorful forms hovering in the air (obviously). They appeared in my mind, though I would not call it my imagination. They were something I saw in my mind, separate from pure imagination and the place in your brain that converts information from the eye into a visual image. That's either going to resonate with you or not, but that's the best I can give you. I saw the shapes and they were everywhere, around every bend in the road and above every black silhouette. They were absolutely beautiful, intense and vibrant with a feeling of joy and lightness attached to them, almost beckoning me to join them as they vibrated in a space I could glimpse from my vantage point in the world but were somewhere just beyond that.
Big Bend is a geology lover's playground. With some of the oldest rock on the planet visible in parts of the park, there are clearly visible traces of a long-gone past: a receding ocean, volcanic ash encasing and hardening around pebbles and boulders, river water slicing through thick layers of bedrock. It's a landscape that has weathered a lot of change, now seemingly still and majestic but unforgiving of error or bad luck. For a decade, my life had been one of constant change. Good change, bad change, neutral change. Change that I chose or change that chose me. Change that had all been necessary. It had become a constant and yet its pace felt glacial, like the dramatic canyons of Big Bend carved grain by grain across a time scale hard to imagine when compared to the little blip that encapsulates a human lifespan. The changes had left an after effect as solid and as heavy as those giant masses of rock. But through those vibrating, other-wordly colored shapes, a metamorphosis was occurring, transforming that weight from a burden to be shouldered into a grounding, something to hover above and draw strength from. They were an invitation to lightness and freedom and independence. It was an invitation I happily accepted, finally.
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