The Heights, circa 1994
Evolution advances, not by a priori design, but by the selection of what works best out of whatever choices offer. We are the products of editing, rather than of authorship.
–George Wald,The Origin of Optical Activity (1957)
I came across the quote above from George Wald (1906-1997) who was a Nobel Prize winning a scientist whose work focused on retinal pigmentation. I don’t know much about that, but his words made me think about how evolution occurs in whatever we do, how we try new things in order to hopefully make our lives better. We keep those that work best for whatever reason and discard those that don’t, mirroring the process of Natural Selection.
This thought made me think of how this has worked in the evolution of my own work. It has been a constant trial of new techniques and materials. There have been small and large changes, some that have stuck with me and are now built into my artistic DNA. Others lingered for but a short time and were soon took their place in my personal annals as examples of a failed past, like looking in a book of natural history describing species like the Dodo that lost out to Natural Selection.
Thought I’d take this opportunity to share a post on some of my earliest work, sort of like pages from my book of extinct species. Some are gone forever as a result of the editing of natural selection, but some live on in certain traits that have been passed down from them. And as I point out in the post below from 2014, the styles and techniques shown below, unlike the Dodo, can always be reborn by me in some manner in the future.
I have been spending a lot of time in the studio in the last few weeks painting in a more traditional manner, what I call an additive style, meaning that layers of paint are continually added, normally building from dark to light. I’ve painted this way for many years and most likely that’s the style you know. But much of my work through the years, especially in the early years of my career, has been painted in a much different manner, one where a lot of very wet paint is applied to a surface, usually paper. I then take off much of this paint, revealing the lightness of the underlying surface. That’s a very simplified explanation of the process, one that has evolved and refined over the years. I refer to it as being my reductive style.
When you’re self-taught, you can call things whatever you please. I’m thinking of calling my paint brushes hairsticks from now on. Or maybe twizzlers. Maybe I will call my paints something like colory goop?
This reductive process is what continually prodded me ahead early on when I was just learning to express myself visually. I went back recently and came across a very early group of these pieces, among the very first where I employed this process. I am still attracted to these pieces, partly because of the nostalgia of once again seeing those things that opened other doors for me. Pieces that set me on a continuing journey.
But there was also a unity and continuity in the work that I found very appealing. Each piece, while not very refined or tremendously strong alone, strengthened the group as a whole. I would have been hesitant to show most of these alone but together they feel so much more unified and complete.
This has made me look at these pieces in a different light, one where I found new respect for them. I think they are really symbolic of some of what I consider strengths in my work, this sense of continuum and relativity from piece to piece. It also brings me back to that early path and makes me consider if I should backtrack and walk that path again, now armed with twenty years of experience. Something to consider.
Redtree Times 