Dennis Hollingsworth

Trees and the Forest

I've been thinking about how my work pivots so much on details, and how scale (bigger paintings) stresses this issue so. For example, witness how the overall pics drop the information we can see in these detail images.

The only comfort that I can take is that it takes both detail and overall shots to simulate what the unassisted eye can see*1. But the art world traffics in mediated images. If my paintings require a you-are-there situation to be effective...

I've got a problem, don't I?

This foto frames one solution. By throwing down marbled paint and scooping it up again, I can have an avenue that opens towards flatness (Greenbergian visuality? Wasn't the deal with him is that his ideas tended toward a disembodied*2 visuality*3 and the large scale that it caters to?

Hmmmm. Interesting. Fat (thickness, mass, materiality) points toward small scale, intimacy. Thin (flat) points toward big scale, mass communication. Is this correct?

I'm still chewing on it.

*1 The issue of prosthesis is very interesting to me, how we augment and overcome the limits of our human bodies with tools to extend our capabilities... this here laptop, for example. Cars, eyeglasses, canes, laser pointing devices...

*2 ...and that this (paintings becoming distilled into two dimensional objects and then into visual principals) anticipated, set up the scene for the conceptualized disembodiement of ensuing PostModernity?

Where's Fran Colpitt when you need her?

Oh yea, she's teaching in Texas.

(Fran knows alot about Clem.)

*3 Didn't I read this in Libby Lumpkin's "Deep Design"?