SERIE AZULES - Impasto Series In Blue
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I’ve been on a bit of a run here with Impasto (translates as dough, mixture, paste from the Latin ‘paste upon’). I’ve moved my experiments with light from colours to texture, seeing how the actual depth of shadows play into the mix. So I’ve purposely used a very limited palette of mostly blues (=azules in Spanish). Only recently I happened upon a very affirming documentary about Monet and Van Gogh intuiting that the atmosphere must be blue or violet. Impasto techniques push a piece from a flat painting to a three-dimensional sculptural rendering. Abstract expressionists made extensive use of it, motivated in part by a desire to create paintings which dramatically record the very action of painting itself. Unsure of what to use besides globs of actual paint (too expensive!), I’ve opted for silicone caulking like you’d use for the kitchen or bathroom and even leftover drywall mud... some good has come of those early years spent doing construction with my Dad. I’m actually building up mountains, studying them and sighting lines of approach like one would prepare for an ascent -- I imagine myself climbing now that I am too weak. Then I wonder how a person without sight would react to this tactile approach -- it’s sort of like Braille Art!
David Suzuki, on the documentary ‘Geologic Journey’, describes how a series of islands crashed into a flat prairie at the old West Coast of North America on the BC/Alberta border, forcing it into towering mountains: "As the Rockies arose the pressure on the rocks bent them like pipe cleaners. It shattered them like crystal. Old rocks grated against new. They were pushed and tipped and stacked, one on top of the other." Isn’t that a staggering description of creation’s vigor?
All the peaks were once the bottoms of seas. The jagged landscape was once as flat as the prairie. Outstanding views were once covered in ice. The Rockies are a story of the shifts and collisions of the earth. Once the mountains arose they were etched, carved and bulldozed by glaciers. At the hydrographic apex of North America, the Columbia ice fields carve into the mountains, acting like a conveyor belt carrying huge boulders and fresh melt water etching it’s way down to lakes and rivers eventually spilling into three of the globes oceans: the Pacific, the Atlantic, and the Arctic.
19th C. philosopher John Ruskin described mountain building as the violent muscular action of the earth’s body. Geology tells us that the seemingly stoic and permanent Rockies are actually restless and malleable, alive. What a mind-stretching perspective on Time!
"I look up to the mountains; does my strength come from mountains? No, my strength comes from God, who made heaven, and earth, and mountains."
Psalm 121 -- The Message
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