OIL ON CANVAS INTRODUCTION
About these paintings
I return to oil painting again and again to explore color relationships and luminosity. Light on this planet emanates from a place where we cannot visit or imagine, so its study invokes a connection to a force far beyond our immediate consciousness. I have felt this connection more recently observing the horizon at all hours.
These recent paintings were inspired by a passage in Bagavad Gita, a fundamental text of Hinduism. It is a dialog between the God Krishna and the hero Arjuna, taking place in a timeless moment on the battlefield before the climactic struggle between good and evil. The part that interests me is in Chapter 11, in which Krishna appears to Arjuna in his god form, not in the human form he has been in until this point. The light is so beautiful that he can’t help but to look at it. Yet it is too powerful for human eyes. This kind of luminosity is found in explosions, in fact Robert Oppenheimer quoted it when he saw the first atomic bomb explosion. Beauty and horror in the same moment is explored in many of these pieces.
