What recently pulled me back into painting was my simple and probably childish need for the beach, and the realization that I could sort of be there, even when I wasn’t, by painting where I wanted to be. As opposed to the conceptual-surreal stuff, the exercise has been a tonic rather than a torment. But here lately old motivations have been starting to resurface and mingle with imaginary beach day. Enter False Memory, Colima, a mostly unwelcome collision of impetuses based on an image that’s been in my head for probably 40 years.
Anybody that remembers old Navarre Beach before the high-rises will remember that the intersection of the causeway and beach roads was just a sand-blown 4-way stop with a lonely Tom Thumb sitting adjacent. I liked the look of that spot back then because it felt a lot like nowhere, and therefore very full of possibilities. Though the crossroads now boasts a full blown traffic signal, turn lanes, and landscaping, the way it used to be has stayed with me. The difference today of course is the influence of presence. Things are always gained and lost when more people show up. Colima presents a similar, imagined scene, detached ideally from time and place but marked with vestiges of presence. I had to write a statement about it recently for a submission:
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A faded traffic sign marks the remote intersection and issues its directive. In the distance, a ruined structure indicates that the sign was once heeded, but the enterprise failed. Sand encroaches on the road. The systems that made this intersection legible as a place - authority, exchange, maintenance - have withdrawn, and what is left behind is not emptiness, but release. What, then, is lost when a place becomes “somewhere”? The openness of nowhere is a condition this environment has been moving toward all along, interrupted only temporarily by human presence.
The ocean is simply there, as it was before, and as it will be after.
I used a reorientation of the Navarre Beach intersection for the fictional spot that borrows the name of Mexico’s Colima state, where neither the sand nor water actually look like this. It’s only real in my mind and is as appropriate a setting as any for a commentary on nowhere vs. somewhere, or space vs. place.
OK. Place is fundamental to human experience. It’s created when human meaning, intention, and social structure are imposed on space. Colima depicts the reversal of that process - place dissolving back into space as the human systems recede. Place is ultimately temporary, but its development creates limitations and diminishes something that was there before. The sign, stand, and convergence of roads were mechanisms that converted nowhere into somewhere, and their decay represents that conversion collapsing. The sand piling up on the pavement is literally space reclaiming place.
Deemphasizing the water, especially after spending so much time with shorelines lately, was a departure and the viewpoint backs us far enough away from the beach to reveal the remaining evidence of how people organized a place. The glimpses of the ocean between dunes reminded me of the view while driving stretches of beach road on Okaloosa Island, where it peeks through here and there, continuous, familiar, doing what it always does. For me that usually evokes a kind of topophilia, but this time I wanted the continuity of that blue band to feel indifferent, existing in space with no regard for human activity or intention, doing what it always does. The overarching constant though is the certainty of both gain and loss in the cycle of space and place.
Anyway, this one indulged a desire to do something conceptual, and it was fun to visit the intersection (pun intended) of landscape painting and philosophy of place. I don’t know what else might transpire in this area and I’m still not really pushing for it because I’ve been enjoying keeping things light. It may mean something that the painting I did right after this one was a crab smoking a cigarette.
