mimesis

My computer is in the repair shop right now, so I'm reduced to David's laptop and am feeling rather lost without all my files and photos at my fingertips. I have new paintings to share and will hopefully be able to post them soon, should my computer survive its ordeal (it's almost a decade old, which is pretty ancient in technological years). Devoid of any photos of my new paintings, I'm offering up one of our wedding photos - it's the quintessential Montana landscape, and we all know how I just can't get that landscape out of my head.

I'm really excited to be taking my art in new directions. I'm trying to push myself and focus more on the process of painting rather than the object - it's easy to lose track of the heart of a painting when you have your nose two inches from a photograph. I'm trying to use photos more as jumping-off points than anything else, and that's a struggle for someone as nit-picky as myself. I often think of Aristotle's Poetics in my attempts at creating art (sometimes I even think of Plato, despite how irritating I find him). A footnote explaining Aristotle's use of the Greek term "mimesis" in the Perseus Project's translation of the Poetics sums things up pretty darn well, I think: "Life 'presents' to the artist the phenomena of sense, which the artist 're-presents' in his own medium, giving coherence, designing a pattern."

Therein lies the challenge.