Painting 4: Behold

Oil on canvas, 200x140cm, 2006

The fourth painting of the series entitled The New Sublime

This is what I wrote to accompany the exhibition of the series at the Freise-Greene House Gallery in 2007:

“The New Sublime: Be Found, Believe, Be Held, Behold.

My paintings come from a deep exploration of the aesthetic experience.

In 1790, Kant defined the aesthetic experience as a combination of reactions to the ‘beautiful’ and the ‘sublime’.  The experience of looking at a painting has the potential to reveal the temporal nature of our being.  It affords the transcendence of the subject from its own boundaries of self-consciousness, liberating it from ideological or subjective intervention.  It supersedes the intellect and the imagination and gives us an indescribable sense of the moment in itself from within the context of the eternal.

‘The New Sublime’ is a meditation on the transitional scope of the contemporary conditions attached to being.  It is an effort to observe and illuminate the sensitive notions of temporality caused by the simultaneous elevation and devastation exhibited in the present climate of what it means to live this moment with this culture and this politic.”