I decided rather boldly what I’m not sure anyone can decide: that I would paint the landscapes as dreams, that I would dream them, that they would be narratives and the stuff in them would have symbolic meaning, not that I would assign meaning to anything, just that it would write itself there as the mind writes narrative in dreams when each thing achingly means deep something. It’s like saying that everything would come alive – just would – and its texture be like life, breathing in rhythm wth actual breath, and the respirable air would fill the lungs with joy of reality. How unreal dreams are (my painting more like that reality) yet how lived-in-each-moment truthful they are.
The first painting is a wall of leaves. A road at the bottom curves somewhere but the plants don’t offer any path to their interior. A dream about opacity of dreaming. A dream about having arrived at the dreamscape and finding it impenetrable. The first is a door that must be opened.
The shapes of the trees are round, and light pours across them like water over a surface. The river of air above just edges into view where all is leaf. The warm flow of sun warmed color and the cool radiance of pure liquid light glancing off and flowing into the brain where it makes thoughts bracing in cool waves of refreshment amid the well baking heat. And cicada buzz sharpens colors, nothing to tell you the insects are there except what buzz emerges as raw color. Does the buzz change light’s velocity? Do they recolor the land with savage sound/music?
The summer day itself is like a dream, bright, enchanting, beguiling, floating, vibrating summer day of endless summer day that goes too swiftly and soon fragments into scatters.
Aletha Kuschan's Weblog 