Primal

Primal:
Staying Upright In a Horizontal World

At some time during 1998 Tom Koch (see "The Saga of Tom Koch" in another section of this website) gave a talk entitled something like "Living Upright in a Horizontal World" or maybe "Trying to Stay Perpendicular in a Horizontal World" and I was struck by the imagery.

 This was a pure concept as expressed by Tom and I decided to give it a go as a concept painting. The bottom line of the talk was the difficulty of staying "upright" when everything around you is horizontal. Are you aware of a double meaning in the use of the adjective "upright"?

 I visualized the horizontal world as a rectangle with the elements of life flowing horizontally through it at about one-third up the page from the bottom. The colors of life would be both hot and cold, thin and thick, strong and weak and they would flow through with irregularity. There is space above the life flow and space below the life space. Above is almost always a symbol for better and below a symbol for worse. Good and bad compared or maybe even "reflected". The life flow is like an Equator and the deviations from the life flow will be positive-negative, male-female, maybe even good and evil. These entities would also be done in varying applications of color both cold and warm, strong and weak and they would be "blown" into their places by the forces stronger than themselves against which they must struggle to stay upright.

 The first step was to cover the rectangular surface with a design and the design also would have elements of hot and cold, large and small as well as strong and weak. Some colors were brushed on; others were troweled on like putting silk screen ink through a screen.

 When the background was complete and dry, it would be time to flow on the colors of life horizontally across the lower one-third point of the horizontal rectangle. A sketch of the plan was made 050999 (see attachment) and the upright colors were to be puddled onto the paper and then blown in the appropriate direction with a soda straw. Some of the entities would be blow to the left, some to the right and some would stay on track by being blown straight upward; the same would be done with the entities blown onto the negative space below the life line. In flowing the lifeline across the paper, the flow could be from left to right or from right to left and the flow could be st any time by simply laying the paper flat on the table.

When I began this project I was anxious to have a concept painting that could almost be an illustration for Tom's talk if it were ever published. I wanted that sort of connection. Things don't always go as we plan however and at some point in the mixing of colors, brushing of paint, squeegeeing of color, blowing of color and tilting and running globs of paint something else happened. The project itself took over and I had to run to keep up. When it was finished, it was finished because I just "felt" that it was finished, I liked the end results but I realized that somehow I had gone very far astray from Tom's talk, but here I had an illustration of the primal things of life. This was a story of creation.....This was indeed "Primal"