Virtually Sublime I remain agnostic whether it is possible today for a painting to hold the power of the sublime as was claimed by romantic landscape painters like Caspar David Friedrich, J.M.W. Turner, Albert Bierstadt, and those of the Hudson River School, or professed by more recent abstract artists such as Marc Rothko, Barnett Newman, Yves Klein, and James Turrell. I have come even to wonder whether recent generations are capable of experiencing what they called the sublime, or whether that emotion is even culturally relevant.
Web-based satellite image servers such as Google Earth® now allow us to access and understand the landscape in new and engaging ways. From ergonomic office chairs, we can click and tap our way through digital perspectives that Lewis and Clark could not have conceived of. Much has been gained with this impressive technology to be sure, but I am also left with the sense that something has been lost.
As the earth is surveyed and recorded in increasingly greater detail, I wonder if we may be developing a cynical hubris—the notion that we know and have conquered the landscape to the degree that we are immune to the complex sensation of the sublime's “delightful horror,” or “terrible joy.” When we look at a mountain range today, without sentiments of the Manifest Destiny Americans once felt or fear of the boundless untamed wilderness, can we experience Kant's “terrifying sublime” and any of its accompanying awe, veneration, pride, hope, ecstasy, dread and melancholy?
The sublime was believed present not only in the mountains, but in the canvas and paint of the artist's creations. For several 1950s New York artists, abstract shapes and drips of paint could hold that transcendental force without representation of the landscape, and viewers confirmed it by claiming to be moved to tears standing in front of their works. Here, recognizable images of the mountains were unnecessary, supplanted by the atmospheric colors and formal qualities of the canvasses.
This exhibition is my most sincere attempt at connecting with that mysterious spiritual power of nature through paint and contemporary technology and through the iconic and powerful image of Mount Rainier. It is my hope that the cinematic scale of this installation and the quintessentially human and loving touch of the brush elicit feelings that can be called at least virtually sublime.
In the magnets of computers will be stored
Blend of sunset over wheat fields. Low thunder of gazelle. Light, sweet wind on high ground. Vacuum stillness spreading from A thick snowfall.
Men will sit in rooms Upon the smooth, scrubbed earth Or stand in tunnels on the moon And instruct themselves in how it was. Nothing will be lost. Nothing will be lost.
Virtually Sublime, 2006 Acrylic, Oil, and Enamel on Canvas, Tyvek, Wood, and Plexiglass
Recent computer mapping technology has allowed me to lift my view directly above this gallery about 6,000 feet, facing in the direction of the painting, and I fly, as the satellite flies, 60 miles almost due west across the Cascade Curtain. I have used this technology to remotely study Mount Rainier, an icon of power and timelessness, in extraordinary detail and from impossible perspectives. Digital images ironically already abstract and painterly were collected, cut, and pasted into a grid, then recreated with quotations of Modernist painting conventions. After having been fragmented through the mapping, digital, and painting processes, individually composed abstract paintings are hung salon-style on the wall so that they come together again to express the mountain on both the micro and macro scales. This piece is at once minuscule in comparison to the real mountain, extremely large by painting standards, and still not large enough to fit on the wall.
Above Rainier, 2006 Extruded Polystyrene, Celluclay, Latex, Acrylic, Canvas, Projection
This piece mirrors the process of satellite mapping servers, which take flat digitized overhead satellite images and bend them over a virtual topographical scaffolding of corresponding points of longitude, latitude, and altitude. In this way, though it is based on calibrated measurements and can provide extremely precise visual information, the image is computer generated and not real. The Virtually Sublime painting is based on images achieved through this process.