AT THE HORIZON SERIES

My ongoing body of work – the “At The Horizon” series – is an idea that I have been exploring for a number of years now. Regarding the horizon, in his evocative opening of HEART OF DARKNESS Joseph Conrad writes: “The sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us like the beginning of an interminable waterway. In the offing the sea and sky were welded together without a joint… A haze rested on the low shores that ran out to seas in vanishing flatness.” And in his own philosophical response to that passage in the introduction to his book THE HORIZON, Didier Maleuvre contemplates that scene and its connotations, commenting that: “Above is the sky; below is the fathomless deep. Nature appears in the primeval, geometric, naked fact of it; there is the earth and there is the sky. Nothing is hidden, nothing obfuscated. Yet the scene is profoundly mysterious. Its immensity kindles thoughts of ultimate concern. The human gaze spans the near and the far, the familiar and the remote.” Maleuvre goes on to cite philosopher Blaise Pascal, and what Pascal termed “the grandeur and the misery” of human perception; Maleuvre concluded that: “We, voyagers, can dream of would-be places and faraway worlds; we intuit the infinite; yet all this infinity highlights is, in the end, the limit of human knowledge: in the end we see only as far as we CAN see. And the more we know how limitedly we see, the more our imagination ventures beyond the blurry boundary….” This current series “At The Horizon” has evolved into my own exploration of the boundless implications of ambiguity, mystery, and promise found where the earth meets the sky. It is an exploration directed as much by where the paint leads as it is by what the subject inspires.

Please click on a painting to select and view the full work in a separate window, that also includes full image information.