Some Thoughts on My New Work

These works grow out of the study of the landscape that I undertook in the years in Colorado. They are all drawn from specific observations of places and plant forms ranging from Colorado to Hawaii to setups in the studio. Although suffused with the freshness of observation, they have a psychological and symbolic quality that derives from my interest in abstraction, religion, and the creation of a dialogue between Western and Asian pictorial traditions.

I have always been a painter of imagination from the painful obsession with the destructive powers of the mind in the military paintings, through the giddy playfulness of the decorative works to the condensed ecstatic essays on the mountain landscape. This continues in the new work in a more mature and cultivated way. While I have always chosen to avoid sticking to one style of painting to facilitate a greater freedom of means to attack different areas of interest, I believe art is not a product, but an expression of the refinement of thought and feeling in which style is not something to be sought or held on to as an end in itself, but the natural by-product of a process of personal growth. In a word, an artist paints a life. Inevitably each phase of my work shares something of the past. This current work retains my love of the landscape as specific place and metaphor, the interest in the heraldry of the mind, the interest in patterns of nature and my devotion to the study of Chinese painting.

The triptych format may be initially confusing. I used it for both symbolic and formal reasons. It makes the paintings emblems of the landscape which points to their symbolic nature. The triptych is a standard format of much religious painting with the main deity or saint in the center and the supporting figures on each side. This suggests a devotional attitude toward the landscape. The geometry of the triptych implies order and stability. It has been used by such diverse artists recently as Rothko, Johns, Marden and Mitchell. Into this format I have introduced the energy and seeming confusion of the natural world.

Huang Binhong has said, "In nature creative forces oppose each other in chaotic fashion awaiting the artist's intervention to restore balance." These paintings create tension in an observer who tries to resolve the conflicts of the relationships of the panels. One becomes frustrated. It forces you to look differently at a painting, much more like looking at a Chinese painting. You must look at the small parts, flow-through it, pick up the rhythmic beat of the brush strokes, sense the musical quality of the contrasts, voids and color relationships. The center of each triptych is like the melody, the side panels the harmony. This is not entirely unfamiliar in 20th century western art. What is new is the blending of the eastern and western perspectives.

These paintings are puzzles meant first to confuse and confound. The cropping and collaging of images point to the abstract qualities of the pictures and the study and search for essences of the landscape. While more irregular and less stylized than formal patterns, there is a focus on the informal patterns of nature and the particular importance of brushstrokes to convey the repetition and energy of nature. Again I rely on Huang Binhong to describe this relationship to painting. "A good painting is orderly in its disorder and disorderly in its order. It is totally permeated with dynamic energy. It's energetic flow endows it with an active presence, a musical quality. It is inhabited with a life of its own."

The connection to Chinese painting is strong in these works. It has been said that the rock in Chinese painting is like the nude in Western painting. It is the most prominent and fundamental motif. Western painting emphasizes the human presence, Eastern painting emphasizes the context in which we find ourselves. The rock is the embodiment of abstract form and frozen energy - the fragmentary symbol of our context: the landscape. It is to this motif that I turn to represent the principle of endurance in the face of change. Even though it undergoes the subtlest nuance of change of light and rhythm of the seasons, it also endures unchanged as a symbol of a spiritual reality that lies beneath the flux of our lives. To this I have contrasted the delicate and fleeting presences of flowers and trees, sky, reflections, and wind to symbolize the sweet but ephemeral joys of life. They stand for the separation of our dreams and our reality - our spiritual and our material selves. But, in fact, they are unified by the continuity of our individual awareness we bring to both of them. The contradictions are united in aesthetic pleasure. These paintings become a window to the joy of awareness.

However, I don't think that these paintings should be seen as related only to the Chinese viewpoint. They address issues that are important to western art as well. Certainly, they represent an attempt to develop a multicultural point of view. They represent a revitalization of abstraction in painting by steering it away from less compelling attempts to make it a style and introduce the freshness of real experience. In these paintings you approach it from what you know, i.e. rocks, flowers, trees, yet it remains unknowable in total. They throw you out of your normal tracks of seeing and feeling by becoming ambiguous. You enter abstraction through the search for essentials of rhythm and pattern beyond the motif. The paintings leave realism for abstraction as a vehicle to express ideas rather than record visual experiences.

I wrote earlier, "Much recent art has dealt with the image overload that is our daily visual diet. This overload of visual sensations has created a mental landscape of confusion and ambiguity," These paintings suggest a way through this ambiguity. They suggest that we do not have to speak of a post-modern world in which our cultural traditions have come to a confusing end, but rather reacquaint us with our intrinsic abilities to see, know and feel. They have a positive celebratory message about art and life.

It is my fanciful hope that these paintings, if given a little time and exploration, will take the viewer to a place so gently described by the early T'ang poet, Li Bo.

The lonely sail in the distance
vanished at last beyond the blue sky,
And I could see only the river
flowing along the border of heaven.

Brad Davis