some words

Beginning
Samantha Krukowski

A painting is a landscape of possibilities-- a form field, a material experiment, a background or foreground, a place of play and imagination. Photographs of people looking at paintings reveal them looking *into* them, finding things in them that were never consciously put down, never put ON the canvas. The way people look at paintings requires a painter to remember the world outside of the work that it, itself, points to. Not only is the materiality of the painted field interesting--its image, vibrant hues and liquid surfaces. What is increasingly interesting, given the possibilities of expanded visualization sytems, is how a painting might move into and out of itself, towards and away from its material existence, based on what may or may not be found in its home medium. The images in the painting of origination are inspired by a host of sources, some scientific, others cosmological, some historical, others material, some digital, others derived from the act of painting itself. It is valuable to find images through the paint, to utilize the postures of painting to make the next form. Images in paintings do not have stable sources. Working between the material and ephemeral worlds of painting, there are fragments, transparencies, mutations of form, color, dimension and sequence. Considering and reconsidering a painting is an experiential, rather than a methodological, set of actions. If a painting is the primary plane or surface from which to derive an immersive environment, the order and components of that painting are set free. We can extend the life of the kinetics of the visual. A segment of a painting can be subjected to a series of changes that not only alter the schema of the original but that extend and transcend its character over time. Overlays of the mobilities and transparencies expose new image sets, image sets that also move and change. When projected, these image sets may be utilized as the ground of a new painting, allowed to run and change and interact with the more permanent marks they inspire. At the heart of an exercise like this is the understanding that the relationship between digital imagery and material imagery is grounded in equal exchange and in the wonder of how the digital and non-digital act in the in-between.