November 2002
Noel Dahl
MFA California Institute of the Arts
ngdahl@earthlink.netSomething which has occupied my production has been this idea of the evacuated space. Where does this space begin and end; where does it locate itself within the painting's frame? How does one paint such a space with new meaning and form? These questions have been a constant through this series of paintings where I began by asking if a painting of the sky could be compelling today? And could it be more than just a representation of the thing we see but also an abstraction of thought tethered to memory? In considering this, the paintings have sufficient mobility to maneuver to multiple areas of signification where the abstraction points directly to the object, the sky, and to the evocative markers found in the histories of landscape painting. This is where I think such paintings function, a location where representation and abstraction coexist without any effort to forsake one side or other.
The construction, the making, is bounded for me through process and memory. That is to say the application of the paint leads to the invented image, rather than working from a photograph or a field study. In some ways I see this approach as an act of resistance to nostalgic representation, the romantic. Yet, I cannot help feel conflicted by this because of a desire for painting to reclaim a poetic gesture and an intimacy with the viewer.
The situation becomes further complicated when one's gaze may transmit beyond the surface and picture plane - triggering synapses of memory cells that have recorded one's own personal relation to the image of the sky. Where does the memory come from, does it find its memory on a grassy park far back in childhood, through an open car window in adolescence, or does it come from some distant place in middle age? The viewer really is crucial to the framing of the painting, designating the meaning by the shifts of the painting's frame, the edge where landscape and portraiture are delineated.
