Blog
Posted on 1/2/2010
By Donald Fox
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A new year usually leads to thoughts of renewal and new beginnings, perhaps more so than the changes that occur with spring. I’ve never been one to do much with resolutions although I do believe in the power of goals, and what are resolutions except a list of goals for the coming year? In any case, why should a change in the calendar signify anything different from the change that can happen in any given moment? On a number of levels, the creation of a painting is as good a metaphor for growth and change as anything. The blank canvas is a field of possibility that allows itself to be molded, plowed if you will, planted and nurtured until the fecund harvest of completion. Large areas of tonality and loosely defined shapes that still hold possibility for most any form to emerge. The painter knows the general direction and the destination, yet a dialogue develops between painter and medium as each new stroke of color, shift in value to lighter or darker, begins to bring an image out of the colored veil. The shift of relationship among the various elements – shape, color, texture, value, line, gesture – it’s almost like a dance of energies that coax the partners into rhythmical motion, this way and that way, faster and slower, movement across the surface while metaphorically reaching into and through. Layers create openings. Contrasts create light. Light reveals form, and a new life emerges that did not exist except in the mind or only the desire of the artist. It is a symbolic journey of great proportion as well as a seemingly simple process of one colored step after another.
