ice cream skies over the Dopaquel Peninsula

liquid painting is an art genre that has not fully arrived or been acknowledged yet.

 

liquid painting is a genre-banger of several preconceived ideas and their originl of manifestation.

 

for example, at core, there is the philosophy of monet and other photography-inspired painters who were processing the intellectual power of F-stops, apertures, film speeds, natural & artificial light, and other things that the machine was doing by the limitations of its nature that could in turn affect their own work. 

 

added to this philosophy of registering the sun light/ day light and the night light/ moon light (a.k.a. tones and values & saturations and hues), monet and others went out of their way to create photographic painting studies in much the same way that photographers were doing this. 

 

the "hay bale experiment" and the cathedral series paintings were not born abstracted from time. monet was among many artists in history and surrounding him who have done similar series/experiments, though usually at the beginning of their process in order to learn these principles of color and light. 

 

many of you reading this might even have had intro art lessons that teach these same ideas.

 

so to make an art out of liquid painting is a challenge. and to be able to create a world out of the challenge is the challenge.

 

back then, photographers and their cameras were teaching the impressionists just as much as the acclaimed japanese woodcuts and magazine advertisements that were simultaneously impacting western art.

 

so let's then add to the mix the second component of liquid painting -- tibetan sand art.

 

tibetan sand art purports toward spiritualism and the essence of nature.

 

all sand paintings are to be blown away. this was one of the fundamental precepts of the art itself -- the essential nature of existence is that we all pass away.

 

and this is the greatest source of our pain. 

 

though we all know that it's true, there are very few who will actually embrace and make a life out of the joy of the moment. this joy does not ignore wisdom or responsibility, but neither does it inflict drugs and medicational poisons upon the elderly and hold their families' wealth and prospects hostage.

 

that is just too damn "intro to the mahabharata part deux."

 

so liquid painting acknowledges this acceptance of death by being willing to be "liquid".

 

a truly liquid painting in the genre does not really begin until it is actually finished.

 

this is when the journey begins. 

 

and change can be everywhere.

 

in my personal work, the form of liquid painting that i adhere to goes a step further in the metaphor.

 

for a great while i have thought long and hard about how to express the universal emotions and human sentiments without being cruel or injecting the hideous violence of our true natures (a spectrum which constantly surprises us with its creativity and horror and also the goodness which consequentially separates the spectrum...)

 

in my own realistic art, very much infused with all of these same principles but conclusive and ending unlike liquid painting, i made a promise to never represent horror and mayhem and violence and terror and loss and grief.

 

the way i was painting, it was too manipulative. it was an infecting power that, if misunderstood, would cause enmity and self-loathing and debt in the viewer.

 

i promised myself that i would rather be remembered for being a gay man who painted flowers than a political activist that capitalized on the horror of others to promote violent imagery and sadness.

 

so i came with the exploding rainbow dahlia.

 

and that is my form of liquid painting. 

 

and my goal is to present a library of imagery that is so massive as to constitute its own legitimate world of vision and light and temperature and the absence of time.

 

the exploding dahlia is the individual consciousness drifing through space in constellations and orbits.

 

there is also jewelry and sparkling lights and promises and hope in these explosions that are eternally in motion.

 

some dahlias become stars and some stars become dahlias as the linear narrative of the developing pieces continues.

 

my hope is that these images, which transfer with amazing clarity and accuracy to textiles, will one day bring joy in this understanding everywhere.

 

so the challenge to other liquid painters or people who would become liquid painters:

 

bring your own form to this genre.