David Stratton

Owensboro, Kentucky

Blue Fire Flies;
acrylic, oil, wax medium on panel,
16" x 16", 1999-2002

ARTIST'S STATEMENT

The work consists of presenting landscape imagery. The landscape images are from specific vistas and views that I gather traveling amongst Kentucky, the Midwest, and the Southeast. The format is typically square, consisting of horizontal sections placed together to make one piece. Some are singular horizontal images. One section arbitrarily loses its representational details and another stresses rational identity alone, or both, or none.

Changes might be made to the image, as a result of my painting process, but only in the act of painting and not losing essential characteristics of that vista. (Johnsian dialectics of representation and presentation apply but only in the sense of my attachment to the specific landscapes that I visit and record.)

It is a personal goal to question object-ness versus perception using color as the fulcrum. The quest might be described as how to show the difference between a sense of place, the identity of place, the sense of object, and the viewers' interrelated experience of these three. The viewer is to have the same joy as my own in looking, looking again, and glancing back, every time seeing a different emphasis, space, or communication. The goal is to find peace, and my peace is creating a balance between the non-objective visual experience and the ineffable content of a landscape.

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