Jesse Thomas
““It is disagreeable to cast away half your harvest, but it has to be done… what we need is a grape with ripe juice, so we throw away one out of two grapes.” The discarded bunches lay shriveling on the ground in the hot June sun.”
-Kermit Lynch, Adventures on the Wine Route
“Through dreams, the various dwelling- places in our lives co-penetrate and retain the treasures of former days… This being the case, if I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house, I should say: the house protects the dreamer…The values that belong to daydreaming mark humanity in its depths.”
-Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
These pictures include images of wine and Dionysian revelry. I’m interested by the history, geography, and classification of wine, as well as the delicate and changeable aesthetics surrounding its evaluation and consumption. Quality and character are located in relation to other wines through context and experience. Like painting, wine gains depth and meaning through the drinker’s ability to place it within a context in relation to other wines. Like music, (although through pharmacological means as well as aesthetic) it moves our emotions and provides access to unvisited niches of the soul. Categories of kinesthetic experience within painting are not limited to the optical/tactile. The richness and depth of visual experience are only subject to the limits of the viewer’s time and energy.
When painting landscape, I have experienced a fleeting, déjà vu- like sense of connection between the visual experience of a form in nature and some un-nameable state of pre-conscious understanding. This quickly receding glimpse of enlightenment eludes description. Perhaps because it is elemental, like the timbre of a musical instrument, its relation to language is tenuous and attempts to describe it are unsatisfactory.
In these paintings, shifting viewpoints and scales result from a multiplicity of sources, reconciled into a more or less fluid space according to my own pictorial needs. I balance the direct application of paint with the layered construction of form and color. In painting, the intersection of subject matter and technique yield content or meaning.
“What is it?” + “How is it painted?”=
The myriad possibilities make working on a painting something like building a machine, a set of carefully modulated parts adjusted against each other until the object- image is resolved and transformed into a site of contemplation, balance, and repose.
The first still lifes of Pieter Aertsen were created during the Iconoclasm. In these civic- religious upheavals, churches were stormed and paintings and sculpture were destroyed. Multiple levels of subject matter exist in Aertsen’s work- the everyday empirical still life and genre scene in shared composition with biblical narratives- resonating against each other on various levels. This protected the work from a reading that could have resulted in its destruction at the hands of a mob that felt the full, dangerous potential of art. The question of what is appropriate subject matter for painting persists to this day (although in very different terms). I see in Aertsen’s work an interesting strategy to circumvent my own doubts.
““It is disagreeable to cast away half your harvest, but it has to be done… what we need is a grape with ripe juice, so we throw away one out of two grapes.” The discarded bunches lay shriveling on the ground in the hot June sun.”
-Kermit Lynch, Adventures on the Wine Route
“Through dreams, the various dwelling- places in our lives co-penetrate and retain the treasures of former days… This being the case, if I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house, I should say: the house protects the dreamer…The values that belong to daydreaming mark humanity in its depths.”
-Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
These pictures include images of wine and Dionysian revelry. I’m interested by the history, geography, and classification of wine, as well as the delicate and changeable aesthetics surrounding its evaluation and consumption. Quality and character are located in relation to other wines through context and experience. Like painting, wine gains depth and meaning through the drinker’s ability to place it within a context in relation to other wines. Like music, (although through pharmacological means as well as aesthetic) it moves our emotions and provides access to unvisited niches of the soul. Categories of kinesthetic experience within painting are not limited to the optical/tactile. The richness and depth of visual experience are only subject to the limits of the viewer’s time and energy.
When painting landscape, I have experienced a fleeting, déjà vu- like sense of connection between the visual experience of a form in nature and some un-nameable state of pre-conscious understanding. This quickly receding glimpse of enlightenment eludes description. Perhaps because it is elemental, like the timbre of a musical instrument, its relation to language is tenuous and attempts to describe it are unsatisfactory.
In these paintings, shifting viewpoints and scales result from a multiplicity of sources, reconciled into a more or less fluid space according to my own pictorial needs. I balance the direct application of paint with the layered construction of form and color. In painting, the intersection of subject matter and technique yield content or meaning.
“What is it?” + “How is it painted?”=
The myriad possibilities make working on a painting something like building a machine, a set of carefully modulated parts adjusted against each other until the object- image is resolved and transformed into a site of contemplation, balance, and repose.
The first still lifes of Pieter Aertsen were created during the Iconoclasm. In these civic- religious upheavals, churches were stormed and paintings and sculpture were destroyed. Multiple levels of subject matter exist in Aertsen’s work- the everyday empirical still life and genre scene in shared composition with biblical narratives- resonating against each other on various levels. This protected the work from a reading that could have resulted in its destruction at the hands of a mob that felt the full, dangerous potential of art. The question of what is appropriate subject matter for painting persists to this day (although in very different terms). I see in Aertsen’s work an interesting strategy to circumvent my own doubts.
