27 April 2025
Ever since talking to Ross about his song “Wall,” walls of different stripes keep showing up in my paintings. Most recent is one of a figure jumping over or emerging from a big red hill/wall form in the foreground towards an anthropomorphized sky entity (sun? moon?) in the distance that is also reaching back over some blue mountains to maintain contact with the aforementioned red form. The composition almost immediately brought to mind Clarence Holbrook Carter's “Over and Above” series of animals peering over walls at the viewer. What I've painted feels like the inverse of that impulse, like the viewer inhabits the hidden or implied part of the image and the figure is escaping it into the depth of the painting. But also being pulled back at the same time—the unity of opposites, etc.