Artist Statement
AQUEOUS HUMOUR
Recent paintings by David Blatherwick
Aqueous humour refers to a thick watery substance filling the space between the lens and the cornea of the eye. It provides both nutrients to the lens and its pressure maintains the convex shape of the cornea. In terms of the function of seeing it does nothing but provide the circumstances under which vision can take place. Once light passes through this aqueous humour, hits the lens and gets focused on the back of the retina visual stimuli become so immensely complex – and interesting – as to defy hundreds of years of research. All hell breaks loose and the results are the arguments of interpretation that go from spirituality to neuroscience. Thus, this watery substance preceding all that seems like the last neutral zone: the transition point between the outer and the inner worlds. This is, as an analogy, where I see painting operating in the visual world as well. A painting provides a circumstance in which a viewer perceives something. If it’s any good, your thoughts pass through it like light on its way to all those receptors on the outer reaches of the brain. If it’s really good, it excites those receptors and passes on the enthusiasm to the mind.
For a few years now I have culled imagery for use in my work from photography and scans of otherwise invisible biological structures. Initially they fascinated me for their surreal forms. As I invested in these images it became apparent what profound function they had in our real world. Bacteria, viruses, and parasites are actual determining factors in our lives in ways so elaborate as to be frightening yet semi-fictional in our definite understanding of them. How could invisible, single celled beings with no central nervous system control our lives or help create the massive geologic forms we see around us? It makes no sense. However, these little buggers are vastly more numerous, communicative, reproductive, and enduring than we will ever be. What’s even stranger is that they live within us, around us, adapt and evolve with a speed that no science could possibly keep up with. As I have absorbed this imagery into my painting practice I have also had to absorb what this implies into my view of the world.
First and foremost, it implies that not only am I not in control, I am not even a separate individual. My stomach is occupied by millions of bacteria coming and going, viruses that want to suck the life from it occasionally occupy my thriving organism, parasites, given the chance, will weave their way through my skin seeking shelter and I walk on rock that used to be billions of mineral skeletons of amoeboid protozoa. Either I am odd or a realist in that I find this not only very entertaining but also enormously challenging to accept. My project, as an artist, is to re-present this situation in a vocabulary of painting. That I persist in doing this in a fashion that is idiosyncratic, fictional, playful, and maybe even beautiful is a way of recognizing its importance. It seems to me we need a place to picture this invisible existence that affects us so immediately that it is also almost ignored in its role in our imaginary life.
Jan. 2010
contact: dwblatherwick@yahoo.com