Yi-Fu Tuan, in Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience says:
It is not possible to look at a scene in general; our eyes keep searching for points of rest. p. 161
If time is conceived of as flow or movement, the place is pause. p 198
Distance is a meaningless spatial concept apart from the idea of goal or place. p. 136
Dancing, which is always accompanied by music or a beat of some kind, dramatically abrogates historical time and oriented space. When people dance, they move forward, sideways, and even backward with ease. Music and dance free people from the demands of purposeful goals and directed life, allowing them to live briefly in what Erwin Straus calls “presentic” unoriented space. p. 128-129
Is it possible to paint unpaused place, without goal and multidirectional (hence undirectional) to paint the dance, to put on canvas with brush, pigment and medium — “unoriented” space?
We are back in the desert. The paintings above are as close as I came last February and March to painting unoriented space. I’m giving it another try.
June
‘unoriented space’,
Yesterday, the wind was blowing yellow leaves off the trees all around us. Leaves were floating in the air, up and down and finally gently drifting to the ground, already yellow. Watching it all with a childish sense of observing the magical.
Bon voyage, peinture!
June that first landscape painting is really well done! Perhaps the clouds need slightly more work and practice if you don’t mind me saying, but the mountains are spectacular, well done!
Thanks, Angela, I appreciate you comments.
Angela,
I was in a hurry this morning, but wanted to thank you more seriously for your observation about those clouds. I don’t have the painting with me, but as soon as I get home, they will be worked on. It’s interesting that I never noticed them until you pointed them out — they were, as we say, perhaps “phoned in” — ie not painted with much care or thought. But that can be remedied. The painting is Jer’s favorite and he won’t mind if I diddle with it.