Tuesday, August 08, 2006

Beckett on the horizon . . . .

I've been reading Samuel Beckett's Molloy, and at the same time, working on a new group of paintings about the horizon. Here's what Beckett has to say on the subject. "And of my two eyes only one functioning more or less correctly, I misjudged the distance separating me from the other world, and often I stretched out my hand for what was far beyond my reach, and often I knocked against obstacles scarcely visible on the horizon." A painting, being a two-dimensional object, offers the illusion of access to another world, and at the same time sets up an impenetrable barrier. It's the mind's eye that travels far into the distance of a painting about the horizon. The hand's eye, though, can actually touch that distance and read its physicality as if it were Braille.