Make each day a verse, with night the chorus
A lot of my paintings have a speckled base layer that looks like motes in a viscous suspension or, verging on the overly literal, a starfield. I used to just paint these looping clusters on a blank gessoed surface, but although that reads conceptually as blankness, it doesn’t actually feel empty. It feels like what it objectively is, stretched cloth made taut with paint. Which can be fine, but it isn’t what I’m after. The direct visceral experience we have that feels most like nothing is in the deep lightless parts of the ocean, the agar in a petri dish, the medium that suspends the organisms under a microscope, and, mostly, in the night sky, where all the old light comes from.
Almost all of the photons that pass into our eyes that are not much less than a millisecond old (from a lamp or a screen) are around eight seconds old (from the sun, sometimes by way of the moon). Photons originating in the night sky are at least 4 years old, and can be thousands, tens of thousands, up to 3 million years old, when the Triangulum Galaxy is above the horizon and the viewing conditions are optimal. The loop clusters in my paintings are suspended. And the little motes behind them might just be similar clusters suspended vast distances away. That’s the way I like to think about it anyway.