Why water paintings and not just water photography?
Water paintings: Photographs are imprints of the past. A painting can be something else.
Above is a photograph taken with an iPhone looking out an airplane window. It shows the Atlantic ocean from about 2000 feet –comprising an area less than a square mile. The shutter speed is approximately 1/125th of a second. In that incredibly short amount of time, in this extremely small area of a vast ocean we can see the potential for a limitless number of watery, sea-foam paintings. I've highlighted five possible frames in red.
I am making the argument that --when gazing at a foamy, watery painting-- you are looking, through an apparatus --not a representation of the past as in the above photograph-- but a window onto "the now". In the time you spend gazing at a watery painting (somewhere out at sea) the exact event is occurring.
With these painting, my intention is to create a kind of anomalous reality rather than representational or lyrical abstractions.
We think of time as a passage. A granular; textured series of moments --past, present and future. We experience time as the blur between.
CNN Headline, March 15, 2014: Malasia Flight 370
A quote from the above CNN story: "Stephen Wood, a former CIA analyst and satellite imagery expert, said the satellites could be seeing something as simple as whitecaps, which he said can look deceptively like solid objects."
#1 Rorschach card with Snellen chart
For me an art making practice is just that --an experimental endeavor. Some paint from a photographic resource --I take photographs based on my paintings. I'd like to think that the paintings spring -of whole cloth- from the deeper recesses of my mind but of course thats a foolish (romantic) idea. I live in an age where the increase in visual bombardment of all kinds of images (dominated by photography) increase exponentially. I think of Warhol's triple-Elvis as my first awareness of the overlapping repetitive dissemination of a visually mediated reality. An avalanche of imprints --can I try and make just one?
JONATHAN QUINN: 56 Bogart Street,
Sept. 14- Dec. 14, 2018
Saturday and Sunday and by appointment
Statement
Why Photography:
The conventional practice of photography —where a shutter opens and light and shadow are fixed— memorializes the past. Beyond representation, a photograph is a record of a time and place that occurred in a mediated instant defined by the camera-apparatus --imprints that mimic what we think of as discreet moments.
As we explore and discover with a camera we anticipate a future of a past yet to be.
Why Painting: Gazing meditatively at a body of water can be a transformative experience. The speed at which water appears on the back of the retina is melded into an amalgam of consciousness as we struggle to interpret time and space through the dapple of light, water, wind and gravity. A painting can reflect how we think we see. What happens between one metaphorical fold of water as it overlap onto another is contingent on what we mean by fold —a wave— whose movement we often ascribe agency. The waves are dancing.
As I mush, splatter, wipe and stroke paint onto a surface I think of the seemingly limitless abyss of mid-ocean. Does it feel like an instant of wet? There are no objects only fluid events.
Why Objects: By using illustrative troupes –faux-scientific, research-like objects– I’m attempting to explore issues of how we understand, organize and interpret the world around us. I think of them as thought experiments that hopefully reveal something about cognition and its interplay with shared interpretations.
What is the nature of subjective experience and its interplay with a conduit?
Jonathan Quinn has been lurking around the New York art world for forty years dipping in with an occasional group show. His last one-person show was in 2017 at Townley Arts in Laguna Beach. He was part of the Club 57 Show at MoMA in 2017-18. Go to his website for more information.
quinnpicture.com