Elisions
In poetry, an elision is an omitted letter, syllable, word or phrase in a line for the purpose of enhancing its linguistic aesthetic. The element is often elided to create emphasis, generate a desired rhythm or regularise the metre.
Elisions are also important features of our visual world.The eyes are target finding, aim directing organs. We are never passive harvesters of visual data. A physiological blind spot accounts for two percent of our visual field where the optic nerve meets our retina. Processes in out brains interpolate this blindspot based on surrounding detail and information from the other eye, smoothening the incongruity so that we do not normally perceive this visual elision.
In this series of paintings I try to parallel this innate gap filling impulse. I sourced the photographic reference material from ordinary scenes from my locale, printed the images and chose one element in each to excise. I then superimposed the resulting incomplete image onto an abstract underpainting. I felt an emergent aesthetic evolve around the successful juxtaposition of the painted realism and exposed abstract paint. This seemed to involve the direction and configuration of the abstract pattern, the shape of the the elision and the colour scheme of the new hybrid piece.
The paintings are an attempt to marry a decadent mannerism of a staid poetic technique to the mundane images of daily life. The titles are derived from elided words and phrases from literary works such as ‘Paradise Lost’ and ‘The Divine Comedy’, with the elided element conventionally indicated by an apostrophe.
In the work I wanted to mirror the fact that we are confabulatory creatures by nature, constantly editing images and memories to conform to our narrative fantasies. Just as we edit a memory with each iteration to better serve our sense of ourselves, each painting was edited with strategic deletions to better serve and enhance its overall aesthetic.