Category: Abstract Conceptual

#1003 Tattered Web of Consciousness

#1003 Tattered Web of Consciousness 16″ x 20″ (40×50) Acrylic on Canvas
#1003 Tattered web of consciousness.JPG

In thinking about representation and abstraction in art, I’ve been inspired by Levi Paul Bryant–in particular, where he writes about the intersecting rings of the material and the symbolic. I think that abstract art, when it moves beyond pleasing the eye, can present the viewer with an enigma, an aporia, that suggests the possibility of symbolic meaning–while denying its realization. If, as I believe, all of our encounters with material reality, are invested with latent symbolic power–by forestalling that power it’s emergence, retaining it at the threshold, just out of reach– where it cannot be translated into language, or interpreted as anything other than what it is—mind, imagination, and perception, by this denial of closure, will remain radially open, and in this, we might yet find a path to revolutionary vision.

 

View more work at Saatchi Art, and on my web portfolio: ART BY WILLARD For photos on this blog, click MY ART on the right panel and scroll down.

#977

32″ x 28″ Acrylic on canvas. Have to see if this belongs. I feel like I’m not so much painting one piece at a time, as adding to a series. This happened with the poems I was writing. Not sure about this one yet.
#977

View more work at Saatchi Art, and on my web portfolio: ART BY WILLARD For photos on this blog, click MY ART on the right panel and scroll down.

#976 Glyph

“Glyph”
24″ x 30″  Acrylic on canvas.
I’m finding that my fascination with patterns in broken pavement, walls of razed buildings, stucco and peeling paint, radiographs, high altitude photos of the earth, cartography, tree bark– has been converging in my recent paintings into a new direction. As though I’d been led–from the time I began assembling discarded fragments and trash on a table in the Ox–to my most recent paintings (say, from #958 and 959)–to the making of images, not raw abstractions, but drawn from life, one step beyond the horizon of understanding, of where we able to name what it is we are seeing.  This is why I’ve been labeling them, ‘conceptual,’ because they are about something… just that we can’t name what it is.
Many of my earlier pieces have a place in this line. Ones that don’t, and are less than satisfying to me, I’ve been painting over. The painting below is a paint-over of #612–a paining that was almost there… but not enough
#976.JPG
View more work at Saatchi Art, and on my web portfolio: ART BY WILLARD For photos on this blog, click MY ART on the right panel and scroll down