Saving Daylight

Saving Daylight, Pastel on Card, 12x16 inches (3-10-2014)

To think of color as a degree of darkness adds light to our total visual understanding.  Viewing one color can also be thought of as the absence of perception of the other colors "out there." If color is understood in purely physical terms, then white light is merely a combination of the components of the visible spectrum. It follows that any individual color would be the result of somehow restraining the expression/presence of the others. Painting affords a record of what was and equally important, what wasn't bound up in an experience.  

Color choice in painting doesn't simply aid in the recording or one experience or enrich the possibility of memory, it results in an art-ifact that has potential or power to further elicit response in a viewer.  The pigments and marks on a support after the art making process have assumed a structure and communicate spatio-visual relationships with each other. They exist now to impress/impinge upon and inform/form the next viewing/viewer. 

Marks are filters and mirrors. Light comes to a surface and at that interface there is an energy transaction occurring.  Light not reflected is absorbed, increasing the temperature of the surface ever so gently and imperceptibly.  The reflections re-tell and reconstruct the story or experience of the artist, a sort of transverse translation. The transformation from sight to thought to mark to reflection to perception to reception is surely altered in virtue of the degree of mediation from the source.  The meaning/essence is not lost though. As with any language/mode of transmission there is usually sufficient lexical overlap for an intended construal, you just have to work at it (ART-WORK).