The idea for my first series of paintings for 2021 came about when cleaning up my studio at the end of last year. I was filing away piles of source materials that had gathered on every surface and while doing that setting aside what caught my eye. One of those things was a print out of Mark Doty's poem 'fog suite' and another was a color chart of Benjamin Moore's trends for 2021. And those two things, combined with reflecting on some of the work I did over the past year that really resonated with me set me on the path of fog suites.
I began by crafting a color story (the Benjamin Moore color attached to a poem), assembling many fog landscape references, gathering up all my surfaces that I'd stockpiled and then building 5 suites of paintings. Each suite shares a size and some landscape sensibilities. There are 12 paintings total.
Now that I've painted and explored the beautiful and nuanced light of the visible uncertainty that is fog I'll be sharing more about each individual painting here in this blog. And very much realizing how this weather phenomenon seems ever so relevant and true to the atmosphere of our current existence.
The paintings, although created in suites, will be sold individually.
“Fog Suite”
”
1. A FIVE-PANELED SCREEN
Fog-lacquered,
varnished in thin
pearl glaze,
the high dunes unfold,
a smudged sketch
for a folding screen,
panels inlaid
with cloudy ivory,
irregular patches
of grassy jade.
(The wide bay’s
oddly still this morning,
despite the white activity
at its edges, just beyond the shore’s
a huge, silvered-equipoise.)
The fog is thinking
of burning away, but for now
damp scarves
(unhemmed, like petals
of a white peony)
slide and tear
across this portion
of sky, sheets
of smudged paper
hung from heaven.
Trope on trope!
What I’m trying to do
is fix this impossible
shift and flux, and say
how this fog-fired
green’s intensified
by sunlight filtered
through the atmosphere’s
wet linens—a green
you could almost drink!
No trick of light
I’m talking about
but defiant otherness:
this sky’s all
gorgeous trouble,
rain beginning
to fold the screen away.
Do we love more
what we can’t sat
As if what we wanted
were to be brought
that much closer
to word’s failure,
where desire begins?
2.
What I love about language
is what I love about fog:
what comes between us and things
grants them their shine. Take,
for instance, the estuary,
raised to a higher power
by airy sun-struck voile:
gunmetal cove and glittered bar
hung on the rim of the sky
like palaces in Tibet—
white buildings unreachable, dreamed and held
at just that perfect distance:
the world’s lustered by the veil.
3.
Or else I love fog
because it shows the world
as page, where much
has been written, and much erased.
Clapboards lose their boundaries,
and phantoms of summer’s roses
loom like parade floats lost at sea.
Is that what it is,
visible uncertainty?
This evening the thin fact of it
appears a little at a time,
shawling streetlamps,
veiling the heights:
clocktower and steeple gone
in roiling insubstantiality.
I take fog as evidence,
a demonstration of the nothing
(or the nothing much)
that holds the world in place
—rehearsal for our roles
as billow and shroud, drift
and cloud and vanishing act?
And, between these figuring lines,
white space, without which
who could read? Every poem’s
half erased. I’m not afraid,
if feels like home here,
held—like any line of text—
by the white margins
of a ghost’s embrace. ”
–Mark Doty
