Studies for BrainTracts

My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery - always buzzing, humming, soaring, roaring, diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What's this passion for?    — Virginia Wolfe

I completed these 18' square studies during winter 2011. They emerged from my previous exploration of outward human connection: inter-personal relationships evolving emotional strength within participants. Here I am investigating emotions as a visual source of visceral experience: remembering events to evoke and integrate repressed emotions; identifying, localizing and naming emotions; making tangible the intangible. I make decisions about which emotions to paint and how to entitle a painting based on my own subjective experience and instinctive personal preference. I explore the creation of analogues of organic images, such as roots of brain activity and amoeba shapes, to expose an inner world.

I experiment with two formats as separate tools for developing my visual language to describe emotion. The first is landscape format. Here I explore the ground as space for synaptic firing in the brain and the space above the ground as transcendental atmosphere depicting how the release of an emotion transmits into the world. I experiment with light to convey sublimity, heightened states of consciousness, and freedom. The second format describes isolated emotions as symbolic hieroglyphics. Here, a central amoeba shape suspends itself within an imaginary space. The background in both formats explores how an emotion influences the perception and/or forming of enveloping emotional environment. I experiment with evoking the cerebral cortex with tangled cotton cord that swells and submerges in alternating layers of oil paint, white glue, freshwater pearls and glitter to imitate brain matter, blood and body tissue. This intensifies the metaphor where suppressed emotions become observable, concrete and public. I enlarge these studies to 40" square canvas to explore how the gravity of geometric symmetry contrasts the volatility of emotions. Finally, I am analyzing ways of exhibiting this symbolic narrative, whether as counter-points or otherwise.

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