BURNTSUN

paintings and notes

TANGIBLE

COMMENTS ABOUT MY PAINTINGS:

These paintings are commentaries on the environment, isolation, and technology. The most obvious image that seems to repeat itself are the smoke stacks. We have several power generating stations in Arizona. Most of them surround the Navajo Indian Reservation. The waste by-products, including smog and contaminated ground water, are entering and making a damaging presence here on the Resevation. The people whom have to live with these pollutions and sights are not beneficiaries of these forms of technology. It is the people who live in urban areas, Los Angeles, Phoenix and Las Vegas who reap all the convieniences. It is these images of smokestacks that remain in my mind and make it onto the picture plane.

Personally, smokestacks are monumental, at least in thier size and the image formed by them. In the nights they are giants with blinking eyes and in the day they are huge trees with fuming foliage. I started painting them because of my facination of these observations. Later, through the media and through the readings of certain novels such as, "Silent Spring", by Rachel Carson, have provided me with information about the darker side of my facination. In real life this realization is also applicable: the plants provide economic incentives while, on the other hand, at the cost of unrepairable damage.

Lately, it seems that this sort of awareness is more of a fad. It is used by politicians as a platform to pitch favorable promises. There are also strong forces here that can not afford to respond to this issue immediately or worse the course is already laid out and there is really nothing to be done that can change the fate...

....These images are also about isolation; I mean how we seem to isolate ourselves by way being inside more often than being outside. We seem to substitute the outside by media vents and other forms of technology-television, internet, wireless phones and all such things. I paint the images as if in a room, usually four cornered in the fashion of the Western domestic living facility.

These paintings have been my concept up until now. Currently I am working on a more abstract approach in which I want to incorporate hints of my own heritage. I found that it is liberating and opening to change approaches to subject. While my environmentalist appoach was important I was limiting my visual language and limiting my growth in technique...I felt it imparitive that I show these paintings because I have just finished the last one very recently and this sort of  departure from it provides a background for furture work. No doubt, there will be residual evidence of this influence in furture paintings.

EARTHSONG

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