Illumination:
a philosophy in painting first embraced during the Renaissance.
The idea: "to see" - not only physically, but also spiritually.
Patterns
abound in our daily lives, our thoughts, our memories, our emotions.
New patterns arise between the moment of experience and the weight
of it - we create patterns to own perception. The movement of
shapes in my paintings indicates images before we've attached
meaning to them. I juxtapose simple marks which, when placed in
reference to each other, transform into complex personal and universal
symbols traversing human consciousness.
I
am interested in how our perception of reality has been shaped
by the technology of the 20th Century. The early use of illumination
in painting indicates the Divine; the use of illumination in technological
media today indicates reality. The images we see on T.V., on film,
in photography, and on the computer screen coerce us into experience,
coerce us into a system of belief. The media presents a certain
reality so concrete it seems absolute, but in a spatial depth
limited to two dimensions. My response to technologically-driven
perception results in three-dimensional objects, yet the communication
occurs in two-dimensional depth created through brush stroke,
color, light, and movement, an attempt to indicate the cunundrum
between the physical and the spiritual, which is the infinity
of perception.
At
the close of the 20th Century, I see the uses of illumination indicating
the Divine and indicating reality not as opposite ends of a spectrum,
but as a circular system of reference. Painting is, for me, a mystical
process, the need to examine the connection between the conscious
and the unconscious, the known and the unknown. My paintings are
the result of the on-going dialogue between intuition and intellect;
as art objects, my paintings stand as a response to both the visceral
and the ephemeral.
Web Site © Shane Guffogg, 2008
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