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Aurora posits that Being itself is ecstatic - with the sun as the animating energy that activates everything in our orbit.
The sun/aurora/dawn is ecstasy and ignites ecstasy. The vegetation (a replication of Albrecht Dürer’s Great Piece of Turf ) represents rapture taking form. This visual quote along with the allusions to Bridget Riley and Frank Stella are intended to indicate an equivalency in terms of operation and nurturance between the ecosystems of Nature and Art.
Similar to the fleeting luminous forms of the Aurora Borealis, the process of creating the painting generated a sequence of transitory painterly referents. In addition to the Stella-inspired lines mapping the proportions of the canvas and the black and white burst evoking Riley’s Op Art paintings, there is a glimpse of Willem de Kooning’s Rosy-Fingered Dawn at Louse Point and an evocation of Alma Thomas’ radiant circle paintings that persist as pentimenti phantoms.
Other associations were not the result of strategy but rather the unforeseen efflorescence of enthusiasms. Notably, Aurora seems in dialogue with The Rose by Jay DeFeo – a work never far from my thinking and heart.
Also, lately I’ve been listening to Daniel Johnston’s astonishing “True Love Will Find You In The End” (my favorite version is his session at the KCRW studios featuring Lucius.
Speaking of Love, he asks:
“But how can it recognize you
Unless you step out into the light?"
This leads to the moment where Johnston enacts the meaning of the song by making a gift of his vulnerability: in a touching DIY audio effect he crafts his own reverb, intently repeating “the light” a second time so that it initiates an enduring echo in the mind.
In doing so Johnston welcomes into being a photon shower that washes over the listener. This succinct incantation of “the light, the light” resonates in the vernacular of one’s tender inner voice - the whisper within that assures and counsels kindness.
As Alma Thomas, whose work also demonstrates the alchemy of empathy, describes it: “Color is life, and light is the mother of color.”
Details and process:
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