Thomas de Groot wrote:
> This is the final version (for the time being).


It's an odd scene, Thomas, and is perhaps too easily dismissed based on 
an initial response to the foreground.  The foreground does not easily 
map to common experience.

So you take a step back and say to yourself, "Let us suppose that that 
is the point?"  Now what do we have?  We have a landscape whose terrain 
is harsh and chaotic.  It suggests the random turbulence of the sea, but 
its heaving disorder is combined with unnatural, squared-off geomtries. 
  It is the worst of both worlds, neither organic, nor ordered.  Worse 
still, the strange, striated coloring, has nothing to do with either the 
unnatural cubes or the pitching topography.  Instead it records a third 
and alien force involved.  We are hardly surprised when we find a 
creature, formed of these same strange molecules, planted forlorn in the 
foreground.

But then there is the sky.  The sky is the chaos we know. An 
appreciation of the sublime celebrated in romantic brushstrokes for a 
century or more. Yours is complex, a brilliant sheen of cloud vapor, 
tufted and matted into hazy, imponderable layers, which mock the parched 
surface.  Yet the sky is the familiar which makes us believe the 
unfamiliar.  Or at least entertain its possibility, while an drifting 
balloon travels beyond the such a desperate land.

Post a reply to this message