Painting the Possible, Representations of the Divine.

 

These paintings are an attempt to illuminate\elucidate on the origin of the world as told by God through the prophet Moses in Genesis 1-2 of the Old Testament. I have nominated for these paintings the dominant elements governing the account, that is: light, fluidity, colour, surface, division and space.

 

The painting’s aesthetics appropriate and give credence to formal abstract conventions, particularly the work of Barnett Newman, fuelled by the anti-illusionist issues raised by the American artists of the Minimalist\High Formalist period 1963-69 a lineage spanning back to the Russian, Kasimir Malevich’s (1878-1935), transcendentalist ideas of Suprematism and Non-objectivity.

 

My use of Malevich’s Supremacist black square painting of 1913-15, in the painting ‘the Genetic Moment’, alludes to the seed of this abstract painting tradition. Also as a sign for the beginning of the Creation\Painting story, specifically light out of darkness.

 

‘Now the earth proved to be formless and waste and there was darkness upon the surface of the watery deep: and God’s active force was moving to and fro over the surface of the waters. 

And God proceeded to say; “Let light come to be.” Then there came to be light.’ Genesis 1: 2-3

 

My paintings should be seen here as not necessarily abstracted from life but the stuff of reality. They seek to weave into the fabric of art and life, a symbiosis of both human creative endeavour and divine Creation.

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Alan Spackman. 1995.