BEGIN THE BETWEEN

BETWEEN DROPS oil on canvas 40 x 50" available

Somebody or other once advised me to clear my mind by concentrating on a blank wall or a nondescript color. I prefer the spaces between: the eye of a storm, the silence between footfalls, and the breath between sentences. Between is the punctuation to the action, the moment of stillness, the break in momentum.

I expect that sounds rather annoyingly cryptic for no reason. But it's meant not to be mystical, but to be focussing. Between provokes contemplation because it's not always the most apparent part of what's happening. Something like that anticipatory wait for the next shoe to drop, and like that, shifting from between to the next action can be very gratifying. Or confounding.

It's what most interests me about painting right now: focussing on those interstices that both interrupt and knit up the visual story. So, say you see a pond on a showery day, and instead of concentrating only on how the raindrops disturb the surface, you try to observe the reflection on that surface. In this case, the eucalyptus tree's reflection blocking the sky's reflection on the pond's surface. It acts like a stencil cut-out, allowing a view of the bottom of the pond. And a view of the fish that slide by, between ripples. The edges of the reflected tree undulate and morph between the sky and tree reflections, and become the Betweens. Mesmerizing.

In this arid place, it's easy to forget, between precious rains, just how mesmerizing.

OK, rain gods: another offering from me to you. How about it?