SIGHTINGS

Kathy Rodriguez

 

Second Story Gallery

The New Orleans Healing Center

July 8 – September 2, 2023

 

James Elkins says in the book What Painting Is that “scratching, scraping, waving, jabbing, pushing, and dragging” define the act of the painter with the medium (Elkins, 96). In my mind, I link these interactions with paint to Thoreau’s ideas on sauntering in Walking (1862). Just as Thoreau describes the etymology of the word saunterer, I think of paint as passing over the landscape of a surface, as an “idle [person] who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going à la Sainte-Terre, to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, ‘There goes a Sainte-Terrer,’ - a Saunterer - a Holy-Lander” (Thoreau, 56). Painters are often identified as lone souls, lusciously working in the texture of oils, and I would say sauntering the paint, in various movements, over their substrates.

 

Elkins also talks about painting as alchemy – the banal mixtures of water and stones (or in this case, oil and stones) that become gold with the painter’s process. The mixed media prints in this show are my own alchemical spells, combining hair, wax, ink, and gold leaf. The materials are visual signs of the alchemy I associate with painting.

 

On walks and drives that I take, I have found what I term sightings – micro-moments of visual pleasure – especially as I find the moon, my planet as a Cancerian, proclaiming its presence. The paint then follows my motions, sweeping, scratching, scraping, wiping, dancing, sauntering, etc. These sightings are meditative, contemplative bits and pieces of landscape, Romantic, Symbolist, and transcendental in the sense of dreaming, inner becoming outer worlds, and psychology. Oil paint’s unique qualities of translucence and impasto seem to me the best forms to depict the surreal experiences I find, anchored by the moon.

 

Barriers like windows and power lines frame and intersect the compositions, but flow in and out of the picture plane as intrusive thoughts do during meditation. To me there is beauty in the way light shimmers on an electrical cord or reflects off smudged glass. I take those moments as part of the whole, allowing them to run through the images as important presences amid contemplative practices.

 

Sighting refers to a focus on some kind of target, to mapping out compositions, to “spotting” as a dancer spins. Sightings maintain balance. The term is often used in describing paranormal experiences. It is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary in one sense as “the action of looking, catching sight of, inspecting or examining, etc. Also, an instance of catching sight (esp. of something rare or unusual).” Conscientious looking at art is one of the parts of making it. I think all these layers coalesce in the work, and I hope the viewer finds the images evoke something of the magic I feel in the moments I depict.

 

"sighting, n.1". OED Online. March 2023. Oxford University Press. https://www-oed-com.ezproxy.uno.edu/view/Entry/179471?rskey=SSs7Xu&result=3 (accessed June 02, 2023