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ACTS OF LIGHT
CONSTRUCTING WONDER
My career began some forty years ago. The early paintings were abstracts but the work always had a sense of landscape about it. The paintings turned toward realism and a fascination for the sea at a conjunction of events in the early 70’s I quit my career as a graphic designer, spent two summers in Newfoundland and inherited a single reflex camera.
The camera captures my specific responses to the drama and complexity of the sea. It’s a compositional tool, a way of gathering detailed visual information. Film stops the continuous motion of the water allowing me to unravel the complex layers of design and it turns light into two dimensional patterns, a phenomenon that has led me to this group of paintings Acts of Light.
I am intentionally ignorant regarding the technical aspects of photography. It is not my goal to make a perfect photograph, which I can then copy into a painted image. As a painter I have learned that photographs are deceptive, providing either too much or too little information, often of a contradictory nature. The creative method involves manipulating that information by adding or subtracting or by combining two or more images. It’s also a refining process that shapes a personal wonderment into a clearer, more powerful statement.
I put photographs through several generations, from small colour prints to larger laser prints to 35mm slides, but not necessarily in that order. Each random change alters the image and its colour relationships giving hints as to what might be incorporated into the actual painting.
One further aspect is the most important and that is the act of dismissing the photographs entirely. At a certain point the painting is turned against the studio wall while I work on others. The piece is reviewed a week or a month later. The photographs have been forgotten and a more personal and deeper expression begins to emerge.
Like many of us, I watch the degradation and destruction of the environment with growing alarm. We are quite possibly living in the twilight of the natural world as we have known it. In that regard, my work is an act of preservation. To preserve the natural world is to preserve a language. It’s the language of the wind and shifting light, of stillness, silence and space. It allows us to converse with the other voices, the voices of our true aspirations, our regrets, our hopes.
My journey as an artist began in my mid teens. I recently came across a quotation that explains what I have actually been doing for all this time. It’s by the legendary Canadian pianist Glenn Gould. “Art is the lifelong construction of a state of wonder”.
Ron Bolt
Cobourg, Ontario
December, 2008
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