Terrance DePietro
In the Wake of the Frost of Dawn
Oil on canvas 60x48 inches 2007
by Terrance DePietro
The images/dreams below are examples of how dreams and creative activity – painting – can toggle and interplay when allowed space to take in Nature’s process. The theme surrounding ‘Future’ and dreams is exampled because these images arrived during a period more calm than has been the case in 2008. The canvas and subsequent digital image came to be in March of 2007 raising questions that there was a synchronistic event on the horizon.
How it will all play out is yet to be realized:
There is a large canvas started in the studio, beginning stage, completely abstract except for what appears to be a woman’s face. The canvas has sat for some time because other than the face, there is no reference or seemingly relevant form to cultivate.
Dream 1:
I am sitting on a stone ledge (as found in the mountains near my home in upstate New York) facing a sky of clouds lit from behind and beneath – as if the Sun is low and I think of it as dawn; there is a column of smoke rising; beneath the sky is a cavern, gorge (?). Lower I see the face from the painting but it is more like a sphinx; water is flowing and the gorge is dark and I am uncomfortable – wake.
At the studio, I place this canvas on an easel. While I am close to it I remark that there are many little forms in the brushwork; some of the forms have resemblances to objects. The objects are different in ‘scale’ and juxtaposed throughout the image, like a hodge-podge of pieces poking from some dark place.
I have had this happen in other canvas and I have learned to follow ‘what arrives. So without taking a second look from a distance, I mix some paint, return to the image and start to cultivate these seemingly random forms. All the day I work, never stopping to test the image from a distance, just letting one form show itself, rendering it somewhat then moving to the next (the process being more intuitive than academic). By day’s end my hands are tired, oily and needing of a good warm cleaning but first I sit at a distance to the opus. As I had hoped, the random parts are forming a whole. Exhausted I leave for home to pour myself a generous mouthful of Havana Club.
After much time, work and energy the painting is brought to its present resolve. As the pieces have come together it has been evident that carnage surrounds the once jutting, singular face; the subjective story of the image is open ended and begs questions – both personal and collective – I know it will continue to change, in meaning, as time passes (A ‘dream series’ has a continuing evolution but a painted image has no such luxury. Once fixed to canvas only ‘mind’ and extended associations may unfurl its ‘other-ness’).
Not long after and many miles from the canvas another dream!
Dream 2:
I am at the Kaaterskill Clove – on the eastern escarpment of the Catskill Mts. The view east is a panorama of the Hudson Valley (a valley rich in history since before the birth of our nation). I am looking at an early morning sky, like the painters who have always come here. Suddenly, as my eyes leave the brilliant sky and drift downward the valley is replaced with the dark gorge of this painting. I am in front of or in the painting? It is like the static image has come alive - in ‘Feeling’ – and I awake as if to a snap of a finger! I go to my computer and can only find a mid-stage-photo of the painting on the computer; I open Photo Shop to cultivate the image. From just below the heralds and their horns, I drape a torn and ravaged flag of Stars & Stripes. It was upon seeing this as a flash that I violently woke from my dream.
Last Twilights Gleaming
Digitally enhanced rendering 2007
Though tempted to repaint the addition of the flag, the digital image contrasting the first image allows for further dreams, associations and growth – in the images, the painter-dreamer and the time they bubbled out from.
-TDP aug2008
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