Super Moon

Super Moon

2017, Oil on two canvas boards

46 x 66 cm

 Painting the moon in the age of the ubiquitous camera.  Painting the moon in the age of live-stream video.  Painting the moon when its very subject is layered with multi-tiered sediments of cultural detritus.  Painting the moon seems like a foolhardy endeavor.

But all the videos and all the photographs, even the wall-papers that one can put onto one’s telephone’s screen, do not seem to capture the frailty of the human eye as it contemplates a full moon.  The technological precision of the latest camera lens surpasses so much what the human eye can capture in situ, one starts to wonder, if that frozen objectivity is really the moon, the one that one sees on a clear evening, usually while walking the dog, that fleeting presence of round reflected sunlight.

And of course, even the full moon herself changes, from one moment to another, as the evening breeze blows low-lying clouds over its pale cool light, as the atmospheric humidity shifts, as the scattered lights from the city below distract our view of that disc that no longer illuminates the night as city-dwellers are spoiled with streetlights, neon signs, the beams from automobiles zipping through the streets.  The frozen equivalences are never truly satisfactory representations.

“Super Moon” was based on an idea of a circular form hitting the inner edge of two canvas-boards joined together.  Initially, there were adhesive tapes cut into the circular form to define its edges.  This semi-minimalist idea, as a matter of fact, seemed to capture the anxiety inherent in the undertaking of painting a full moon.  And the painting progressed, the layers of paint, the sediments of daily work,  the layers of greys, and indigo, then semi-opaque glazes of pale green light, then some translucent violets toned down with earth green to attempt to redefine edges that keep fleeing, to define form, wanting to be more than a flat disc, tried to somehow capture that fleeting element that one would call “moonlight.”  

The process of painting takes time, and compared to the click of a camera, a near eternity.  That circular form hitting the inner edge of the canvas board demanded respect.

Painting the moon in the age of ubiquitous technology that makes any other mode of image-making seem quaint, antiquated, and even reactionary.  But when one of the only ways that one can declare a certain amount of independence from ubiquitous technology is to put mud on two canvas boards, then despite all the quaintly raised eyebrows of “whatever, man,” all the snuffled smirks and hidden silences, that circular form at the inner edge of two canvas boards seems worth spending that near eternity to paint.