Culen, Lubos. Introduction  in Borderlands – Imagining the Immaterial
(Catalogue), Vernon Public Art Gallery, March 2008, pp. 4-5

Culen, Lubos. Interview in Borderlands – Imagining the Immaterial
(Catalogue), Vernon Public Art Gallery, March 2008, pp. 14-24

MacHardy, Carolyn. “Liminal Spaces” in Borderlands – Imagining the Immaterial, (Catalogue), Vernon Public Art Gallery, March 2008, pp. 6-11

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Interview

Interview in Borderlands – Imagining the Immaterial
Lubos Culen & Shawn Serfas

Artist’s  Studio,  January 24, 2008

Lubos Culen: In your research and artist statement you talk about the fact that the foundation of your artistic and studio practice deals with issues and relationships between identity, place, ancestral origin, religion, relational abstraction and environment. Could you comment on that?

Shawn Serfas: I think that all those ideas are interconnected and related. For me personally, identity is a question of the nature of an artist, a creative person, a creative being, and what that all entails: looking at my place in the environment and my relationship with material space and the relationship with this creative process and practice that I have come to value; painting. What in fact is that? What is its importance? Is that a necessary act? Why do I place so much value on it?

Identity in my artist statement is referring to myself within the context of the value I place on art, creativity and painting in particular. Then again, I can go on with that, and I will in the sense of how identity relates to place and ancestral origin, religion as well as relational abstraction and the ideas you mentioned. I am a product of my placement in this environment, this world. The importance of the research I embarked on is about places.

We talked before that I am a landscape painter, and I believe that I am not a rather conventional pictorial horizon- based landscape painter, but I am, in fact, an abstractionist that is heavily influenced by the landscape. So, I seek identity through a place; I paint places. That can be, obviously, interpreted on many levels. And then again, it has everything to do with ancestral origin, and experiences that happened in the past. I find it very fascinating, with my own history, my Germanic and Ukrainian descent and where that came from, the whole lineage of that, all the way back to the cultivation of human history. I am interested in the whole breadth of time and human lines. And, of course, it is tied to the religious interests, or theological interests that I have.

I meant to ask you: What are your religious interests? Previously you mentioned Abrahamic Theology and Christianity...

Yes, specifically Abrahamic Theology and the relationship of Christian and Islamic thought and belief, and of course, the Judaic connection with the two of them. It is interesting to research and really try to understand the historic implications of Jewish theology for present-day Israel. Also, the 3400 year connection between Christianity and Jewish history, it is highly interesting that both religions have the same lineage.

Of course, ancestral origin ties into that because I come from a predominantly Christian background, not just in my contemporary self, but through the history of my family that comes from Germany and the Ukraine. On many levels I am interested in how Christianity has shaped my life and how it continues to inform my work.  But the whole assemblage of theology, the science of God and how it has impacted the whole world is a fascinating subject.

Another question that is closely connected to this is that you state that a part of your practice is preoccupied with ontological questions and implications.

Yes, I think the nature of being or asking about our past, present and future is one of the most significant questions for the human race.  I do not think that any of us can argue that if we looked at the global scale of the major religions and the numbers, the statistics that talk about that question: what are our beliefs about those sorts of issues?

But certainly, that has been a very specific part of my research for the last five years. I have been looking at archaeology, old texts and the fascinating connections that are there, and I have been trying to incorporate that into my work on some levels. In some bodies of work it is more explicit that in others, but in other bodies of work it is certainly more hidden.

Are there any concrete references to that?

Yes, there are. In some pieces in this body of work there are titles that make reference to it. As you have noticed, some of the titles refer to some specific debate between science and religion. Some of them will have more of a scientific presence to it, and, obviously, some will have more distinct theological implications, for instance the Dark Black Cloud paintings numbers one and two. They reference an old Judaic text that talks about how God took on the presence of a dark black cloud in the temple before the Jews were exiled to Babylon. It is one of only a few references in the Old Testament text that talks about God dwelling in a dark manifestation. 

When I first read that a number of years ago it really stuck in my consciousness. The presence of the cloud must have been overwhelming for those people and for the writers to present that information in that way. There are also ideograms and symbols that I use in this work that have a significant theological or ontological reading.

Shawn, you were talking about ‘nature’ and ‘visible environment’, and ‘super-nature’ as an ‘invisible environment’. Could you comment on that? What is the distinction?

That comes from a writer Philip Yancey who coined those phrases. It encapsulates the whole premise of this exhibition, Borderlands, it talks about this in-between place. You can extrapolate that in terms of just geological or environmental concerns. And of course, it is on my mind, but, more specifically, it talks about what we do not see.

There is a whole world out there we do not see and it can be looked at from a purely physical way. We do not see, for example, the quantum levels. We do not see the large, grand macro levels that are a part of our physical space. We all see through a specific lens and we are limited in our perspective; we all are. So on that level ‘super-nature’ and ‘nature’, the invisible and the visible environments relate to matter we do not, and matter we do observe. But, on the same note it is highly metaphysical in the sense that there is a world out there. There is an invisible spiritual world out there that is not seen, but it is as real as a material world. It is immaterial in fact. 

Looking at your artwork, it is obvious that you are placing the viewer in a situation of looking at a bird’s eye view image of the Earth.

That is one reading. I believe that I look at a majority of my work from my topographical sensibility because of my history.

Yes, I was going to ask you; how did you arrive at the current mode of expression?

It goes back to my education in environmental science and looking at remote sensing science.  I was looking at how we, as human beings, remotely sense our environment.  It is a vast scientific field which includes the surveying of abyssal planes, surface features under glaciers, mineral and oil deposits in the Canadian Shield and of course the micro environments of cellular and even quantum structures. 

The science researches how we, in fact, measure the distance in a cosmological sense; the red shifts of the stars.   It too explores how we map other surfaces, the surfaces that humans can not arrive at in the physical sense. I have arrived at my mode of expression over a period of years looking at different kinds of maps and spending a lot of time photographing surfaces and looking at the connection of visual structures in science.

We talked about fractal geometry before, and how that contributed to my undergraduate research concerning the physical geometry of our space, both micro and macro, at least in a physical sense of the word. Fractal geometry explores the continuity and proposes that all structures are self-similar, and it is just scale that changes. That is what some titles are referring to – self-similarity – everything is similar in nature structurally. That is one reason, and of course my upbringing on the prairies was pretty instrumental, in experiencing the prairies both as a person who walks through these spaces and spending a lot of time looking at the flatness of it and trying to get above the plane.

Prairies are flat, and you are trying to gain a higher perspective, and whenever you got that, you relish it. I do not know if people in elevation-rich territory have that type of need, because there is a great deal of topography. But on the prairies you are grounded. You have a certain perspective and you strive to see the world differently.

From that point of view, abstraction seems to be a fitting tool to reference the landscape. In your mode of expression it is the bird’s eye view and not the geometric perspective.

Yes, and again, it is not exclusive. I have painted many paintings where there is a duality in the works, something very figurative, and then there is the hovering, or the distant reading. There is always the push-and-pull between the reads, especially with these monolithic forms. Clearly, there is something very figurative – ground.

Since you mentioned that you grew up on the prairies, I want to ask you if you were influenced by Saskatchewan painters who worked in abstraction, for instance the Regina Five painters. Did they influence your work?

Certainly, I am a product of where I was educated, but the Regina Five painters did not influence me particularly. I actually find them more stimulating now then I did when I was younger.  I remember being first impacted by an artist named George Glenn who was a figurative painter. He worked in many genres and it was a large landscape canvas he created that helped foster my relationship with painting. He is the first serious Saskatchewan artist that influenced my work. I took classes from him as well.

What is interesting with that particular group of artists is that they started with abstraction and were influenced by Clement Greenberg, but later in their careers they reverted back to representation. Your personal development as an artist happened the other way around; you started as a representational artist and later you developed your mode of abstraction.

Yes, I was far more representational and quite figurative actually. I did a lot of portraiture and only dabbled with the landscape in the conventional sense. My schooling was quite traditional in the meaning of observational figurative work and I continued with that for most of my undergraduate studies.

Near the end of my undergraduate experience at the University of Saskatchewan I started to develop a more abstracted mode of looking at the landscape. I was looking back at my sources and motivations which led me into the visual arts. The environmental studies that I began with infiltrated my visual language and became one of the main artistic cores of my practise. I remember sitting in my science classes thinking and trying to visualize the forces and mechanics behind geomorphology and atmospheric theories. I wanted to explore the issues behind time and the evidence of temporal-physical forces like erosion.

I am quite interested, for various reasons, in questions about representation and abstraction; how do you see abstraction as a mode of representation and its propensity to convey certain intended meaning? I know it is a loaded question, but, as I mentioned before, it has been in the forefront of my interest based on some experiences and looking at abstract paintings and their evocative nature, specifically. What do you think about this matter?

It is an interesting question; I might get off the topic a bit here, but I would like to get back to the previous question about the Regina Five. Thinking about my background in Saskatchewan it is obvious that I was influenced by many people like William Perehudoff, Eli Bornstein and Otto Rogers. They are all over the place; you can see their paintings everywhere...  in many commercial buildings and in a number of public spaces. 

Certainly I have adopted a sensibility from them on some levels, but more importantly, from Bornstein and the writings of The Structurist journal that was published at the University of Saskatchewan.  It is a journal that really looks at the relationship of art and science. These journals had many articles that looked at relational structures in ecosystems and structural art and much of the writing was by biologists, architects and general scientists.  They would write about the relationships of human structures – matter and the environment. 

From early on I was educated in the relationship of art and science through the art ‘stream’, but also through the scientific ‘stream’ that we talked about. So right away there is an automatic connection for me, and, of course, a voice. Growing up in northern Saskatchewan you are inundated by the landscape. But to answer your question even further, the writings of Charles Biederman had a significant impact on me as well. He said something I mentioned before... that ‘nature’ is the genetic source of all abstraction of art. When I read that for the first time, it rang some truth for me; that is how I see everything. I see everything through the lens of having some environmental impact or quality to it; for example the nature of light, colour; you can not deny the nature of light and colour. It is in fact ‘nature’, it is in fact environmental, and it is in fact a physical force and property that is inherently not painting. It is inherently something else first. Artists like the The Boyle Family and Mario Reis adopted these things, these forces, and these physical attributes. So its primary purpose was something else. It was something in the environment, something not even human. I think abstraction is representation.

Basically, you are saying that that the knowledge of the environment, the studies of the environment found their way into your art making quite naturally...

Yes, that is how I look at any so-called, or labelled, formalist piece of art, which we talked about in our last discussion, that I do not believe in. I respect its history and supporters as well as the contribution it made to art theory.  After all, every creative intellectual field seeks answerers from self and seeks to understand itself through its own properties at one time or another.   Inherently all visual languages use structures, or qualities, that are inherently found in the environment first. Just look at the characteristics of the material. The materiality, physical placement in space and the interaction with light in painting is connected and has a conceptual weight that is not art first and is not self-referential.  I think that is a limited perspective.

Charles Biederman’s writing The Real and the Mystic in Art and Science from The Structurist (1956-59) held a lot of my thinking and it is just intuitive and engrained now... I do not think it is possible to change that for me. That is one core aspect to my paintings and I seem to read most abstract paintings in that fashion, as having environmental qualities to them. I have a hard time seeing abstract paintings in any other way. The fluidity of the paint in its raw sense begins the painting language in a very organic method.  So even the hardest edged painter would fall into this organic belief at one point or another. Obviously I see things like this because I am a very fluid painter. There have been many painters in the past such as Morris Louis and Frankenthaler who are very fluid painters. Their fluidity has a specific inherent conceptual weight to it, it is not just about staining or how pigment is set up on a pixelated canvas. It has an intrinsic symbolic meaning behind the fluvial passages; it is very environmental to me. So yes, I do much of my reading through that lens. Does that answer the question?

Yes, to quite an extent, but I want to ask you another question, this time from a viewer’s point of view. Dealing with abstract imagery, many times it is not quite certain as to what the intended meaning is. So, the question is: How do you see a viewer interacting with your work, and is it possible to deduce an intended meaning in that work? Basically, all of your experiences and thoughts are parallel to your working on a canvas. Is it possible for a viewer to reconstruct the meaning that you intended?

Well, I think it is possible to have a viewer reconstruct what I intended them to read. My paintings are pluralistic in nature and have many layers of intended content.  I think it is totally possible for viewers to experience some of the layers and if they spend enough time with the work new layers will start to be revealed. 

However, with abstract painting there are many different approaches one could take upon reading the language and of course viewers bring their own perspective baggage with them.  But the viewer may not get the intended meaning because of various reasons... maybe they can not read that well, or their reading level is not of this language – they just do not know how to read it. There are many people that do not know how to read abstraction.

At least, you provide the viewers with titles, which provide some sort of entry point for decoding...

I think that my paintings are not an easy read, because I never want to make an easy read painting. But the nature of the material in all the paintings evokes a specific quality to the reader. I would think so; my experience of listening to people provides that background. I think they do get an environmental geomorphic kind of sensibility from it, it feels earthy.

I think that the paintings also, from my point of view in reading people, have primordial qualities to them, because they feel like they have been around for a long time, not in a sense that I have seen this before, but they feel like they have an age to them, they have been with us for a while, they do not feel like they have been painted yesterday. The process language is hidden from them, and I think it is one of my tools that I use. It is one of the things I strive for, to hide the process. I am very process oriented, but I like to hide it; I do not want the paintings to have a beginning and an end. I want them to be cyclical in a sense.

Yes, from that point of view I want to make an argument for painting. Painting as discipline has survived despite the claims of all the naysayers and other proponents that would label painting a modernist remnant. But listening to you speaking about it, it is obvious that pictorial propositions are quite open ended; there is no beginning and no end. You talk about ‘material and immaterial imagination’. Could you comment on that?

That is another instrumental thing for me. Gaston Bachelard, a French scientist and philosopher who wrote predominantly in thirties, forties and fifties, wrote about material imagination more specifically, not the immaterial imagination as much, but he alluded to it in some ways. He talked about two senses of the idea; he had a definition in two parts: how we as human civilization imagine the material world, that is how we imagine the ocean, the sand and the light on the beach or how I imagine what your bottom dresser drawer is like at your home, and those types of things; the larger kind of perspectives. But he also talked about how we imagine matter, basic matter. Like how I imagine the cup you are holding, not just its external structure, but on some levels its internal structure. So, it is about how we human beings use our imagination to think about the material world and matter.

Since we do visualize or think in pictures we are always dealing with that material imagination. All of us have different nuances, subtleties and qualities of that kind of thinking and observational awareness. He wrote about that, he wrote Poetics of Space which talks about space and matter and how it frames up new spaces and how poetic it is once one spends time with it.  For instance, when one actually surveys the register of that heater (in the studio) and looks at its structure and its architecture we experience new spatial awareness of that object. So it (the concept of imagination) came from that, but it is a mode of thinking; that is what I do, I am a painter who remotely senses landscapes. I think about these imaginary and literal immaterial worlds – they are both, material and immaterial because they relate to the physical landscape, of course, because that is what I can draw upon. That is all I have ever experienced. That is where the immaterial imagination comes into play.

I know what I have seen and studied, I know where I have been and what I have dealt with, and environments are highly influential, and this is how I imagine that matter. Borderlands is looking at that place in-between that imagination and the immaterial. I am interested in it, and what does it look like? What is the immaterial - in the sense of the word that I can not see - that is physical which is also metaphysical? I can not, obviously, see the quantum levels of the world, I just read the books. I will believe it, or may not believe it, but that is all I have. All atmospheric science is to me is in the texts and images, but I have not really experienced the adiabatic rate of temperature fluctuations. I have not experienced (seen) atomic structures or the corona of stars or the metaphysical or spiritual realms that Abrahamic Theology talks about. It is fascinating; the dark black cloud from Jewish writings. That is pretty heavy reading as far as I am concerned, and not to mention all the other things that are involved in those texts that deal with immaterial structures.

So, when you think of something really potent and symbolic, or symbology for that matter, in the Judaic writing again, it talks about temple worship, temple structures and sacrificial ceremonies that are all just symbols for larger, more significant temple and a presence that is not a part of this physical world. It is somewhere else; it is in heaven in those writings. Down on Earth, it is just a remnant; it is just a little glimpse of what is really true. I find that really interesting.

For me, the paintings are physical structures; paint is physical, it is synthetic for the most part. There are some first-order materials there, but there are also plenty of non first-order materials there, there is third and fourth generation materials on my paintings. I was telling Carolyn that if I had it my way and had access to certain resources, I would probably be pouring metals. That is why I draw much of my artistic inspiration from environmental artists, people like Mario Reis who takes canvases and suspends them in fluvial streams and catches the suspended load and fixes it to the canvases. If I had to say again what I am influenced by, certainly it would be my past in Saskatchewan and what the Canadian Prairie Abstractionists offered to art history (Emma Lake).   But I also have this other side that is highly environmental and I look at the ‘earth-based’ artists. I guess in a specific fashion, I mentioned Mario Reis and the Boyle Family, because they are, I would say, environmental artists that are also picture makers. The Boyle Family, specifically Mark Boyle’s Journey to the Surface of the Earth series basically surveys land and he does resin casts of the earth and puts it on the wall. It is a document of the site that really exists, because they document everything about it including soil and vegetation samples. They also study and collect atmospheric conditions as well as any kind of life that is a part of that space. They work with the conventions of pictorial traditions, but also look at the first-order materials, and I find that quite fascinating. It also relates to the kind of matter (origins of the matter) that we talked about, with people like Jaap Wagemaker and Bram Bogart and Antony Tapies on some level. They are the European matter painters whose work really emphasizes the material structure and what is inherently the conceptual weight of the material in their work. And, they are still picture makers.

I think that I am of both sensibilities. I obviously respond to the work that is more traditional, like painting. Of course, I can look at other paintings that I have done, for instance the Stone series where I was collecting minerals and objects from different sites in the environment and embossing and integrating them into the conventions of traditional painting. The Stone series took on a mathematical equation kind of form which has a connection to the traditions of painting and something more site specific and documentary. They are actually objects that had a previous placement.

We were talking about history and passage of time. I want to go back to your statement where you refer to natural entropy and a sense of passage of time of certain unrecorded history. From that point of view, your working strategy is to reference the material field and consequent erosion where the resulting visual structures resemble the Earth’s surface. Then, in addition to the organic Earth-like structures like fissures, sedimentation and tectonics, you introduce some other iconography, for instance, circular structures. I have three questions: Why the juxtaposition? How do the elements function in the pictorial space? How do they contribute semiotically to the conveyance of the intended meaning?

I am always looking at methodologies that resemble a physical force, something that resembles geomorphology. I am always looking at new methodologies to reinforce the geomorphology in the paintings. We talked a bit about abstraction and thinking about objective and non-objective abstraction in our previous conversation. I am always looking at translational qualities of abstraction and how it relates to geomorphology; I am always looking at increasing that vocabulary. That is one of the predominant elements, but, of course, they are working in concert with very dominant and sometimes subdued geometric forms.

The geometry and the fluvial nature, I will call it gestural, that contrast on a very basic level is a contrast of a human mark versus non-human mark. One can also say it is material versus immaterial metaphor for that as well. I argue that is there, too. On a very basic level us, as human beings, make our marks on the environment and leave certain ideograms, unrecorded history or residual structures. Many years ago I was influenced by the results of a photographic series that I was working on. I would take photographs of old foundations and observe how the environment and its physicality, the forces of nature, reclaimed those sites. Looking at that juxtaposition of how this geometric concrete foundation laid in the land was very powerful to me. This relates back to the prairies with the agriculture, reordering and reconditioning of the land. From an early age I had this contrast, or this language brought to me, this communication and juxtaposition between these two things. On a very basic level, it is looking at the human mark.

I use certain iconography, as you mentioned, with some work having a vertical bar or a monolithic form positioned against a radial form, or spherical, halo forms or multiples of such things. There are also compass marks that are a part of many paintings – there are many structural ideograms. In some works I use cruciform structures, table and temple-resembling forms. Some are more significant than others. But I will address the monolithic forms first. They come from looking at the history of a vertical line and how it is a part of so many cultures and so many languages, both visually and through textual concerns. It references connections between the material and immaterial, between humanity and divinity, but it also looks at more environmental aspects of symbology.

In Eastern cultures the bar represented many different things, for instance lightning and the alchemical symbol for nitrogen. It represents a connection between something below and something above; it is very figurative and hard edge in a sense that there is a crisp borderline between one space and another space. In some areas it is really a hard edge, in some areas it bleeds in and melds and it is a barrier that is broken down.   The monolithic form is a foundation mark of something intelligent.

That actually answers the question about how the geometric forms semiotically contribute to the conveyance of intended meaning...

There are many circular forms, or radial spherical forms in the works. The ‘halo’ is dated back to early renderings of animals and humans 5,500 – 6,000 years ago. In Middle Eastern cultures it represents divinity again and it references things that are cyclical, things that have no beginning and no end.  They are also cosmological; it references the sun and the moon as well as astronomical events such as eclipses.

In Western thought it also takes on a certain topographical mapping quality of surveying land and value; when you circle something, you try to point something out. You are pointing out something that is significant. So the circle becomes a sign for a direction and pathway. The monolithic form and the halo structure obviously connect both of those ideas together, of looking at the human relationships to those things, to all of those ideas that I was talking about. They are some of the most loaded structures known to humanity; they are rich and most powerful, in my mind. It certainly has a rich history in Western art.

Yes, as symbols they are quite universal; especially when we talk about something being cyclical or having no beginning or end. Those are all metaphors that even First Nations people here use in their mythology.

In your artistic practice over the years you made a shift from representation to abstraction, and I was wondering how do you see abstraction within the contemporary discourse? You know, there have been people in the last two or three decades that claimed that painting is dead and that abstraction is solely about the representation of space and it does not go past that point. These are somewhat older opinions, since there has been a revival of painting as a discipline in the eighties, and, obviously we are still preoccupied with painting...

Painting, or abstract painting in particular, has plenty of room to develop. If we were to start surveying the history of Western abstraction, even Eastern Europe and Asian abstraction, there is a significant amount of possibility left. There is a great deal of abstract language which has been uncovered during the past century, but there is plenty of language to undertake. I think contemporary abstract painters have to look at that past and see what has been done. That is where we are coming from, and we have built our language off that.

We need to continue building and addressing the needs of contemporary society and contemporary people living and creating today. I see painting as a viable presence amidst the technology and the digital age. I see it as a valuable and practical outlet for people. David Urban, who we talked about previously, wrote an article in Border Crossings about a year, year and a half ago about the paradox of painting and how painting offers us, as viewing people, or observational people, the engagement with something that is both an object and an illusion. I think that painting does that very well and is its draw. 

Painting offers us that; it offers us an object that is a physical piece of material – it is a matter, and we bring our imagination to it.  It also gives us a space; it gives us a window to something else. I think that painting will survive on that notion alone. But also, I think it will survive because of the very fact that it is something that has such a tangible and rich history to it in terms of its material nature. A great deal of abstract painting today seems to be getting plenty of attention in certain institutional circles. It seems to be dealing with your question specifically; how abstraction and representation meet, and what that relationship is. There is painting out there that deals with it quite literally. Some artists will specifically render highly representational imagery that is buried in abstraction. Others will formulate abstract compositions from analytical or remotely sensed observations.  I understand that realm of thinking and think that all of us seem to be doing that on some level. We are drawing from our environments information to build from and abstract from. The contemporary discourse surrounding abstract painting is debating the value of the very act. 

There seem to be very literal ways of linking abstraction and representation. It seems like a very sensible way of doing it; let us bury representation with abstraction. I do it on some levels. In the past I would draw on canvas with graphite, some sort of landscape, and would bury it with abstraction. When one starts thinking about that... it is a process of maintaining distinct, specific, and tangible connections with your sources of inspiration. If you look at artists like Julie Mehretu, Cecily Brown, or Fabian Marcaccio, all important artists that are in the forefront in terms of abstraction, they are really abstracting from nature. I see that is where the contemporary abstraction seems to be, we all are referencing nature. There is also abstraction that is of more of a hidden vein which seems to be more about purist thought and self-referential work. People seem to gravitate towards abstraction because of the possibilities it has. It has so many possibilities; it is something unseen.

Shawn, could you talk a bit about ‘relational abstraction’, a term you use in your statement?

When I think about abstraction, I use that term to describe the abstraction I do. I place it in the discussion around objective and non-objective abstraction, and I place it between the two. I place it in the translational qualities of objective abstraction, but I also look to the history of non-objective abstraction and the visual languages that took place over the years in that realm of thinking. I would say that I prescribe more to the objective realm and history of abstraction. I think that both terms are very limited and they do not really describe what it is that I do. Quite frankly, I do not think they describe what many contemporary abstractionists do.

Relational abstraction for me is basically a term that I use because I am not satisfied with the other terms. I have a definition here: associative relational abstraction is concerned with abstracting experiential content out of the material and immaterial environments with remote sensing processes. We talked about that, but I just wanted to bring this up so you know what I was talking about.

It has been articulated that there is no quick reading of abstract work. As you mentioned before, there is that quality that reveals itself and the image is more of an associative structure rather than just a label for reality. So, for the time being, is the abstraction an order of the day for you?

For me, it is. I do not see anything on the horizon to change my perspective or language. I think it is necessary for the artists today, and it is necessary for me as an abstract painter to maintain a close relationship with my sources. In the past I went astray a few times and it completely left me empty where my paintings were very vacant feeling. I think that a successful artist has to be connected to their sources.  To bring it into full circle, as we were talking about nature and super-nature, abstraction for me is like super-nature, something that moves us into unseen realities.

Is it an entity through which you describe reality?

Yes, basically, that is what I am trying to do, and that is why I am, on a bare bones level, a landscape painter. You can take it or leave it; it does not matter to me. I am just as much a landscape painter as the Group of Seven or Augustus Kinderdine. I just describe the landscape in a different way; both the material landscape and the metaphysical landscape.

I think that all landscape painters deal with the passage of time and the unrecorded history of a place. If you look at any landscape painting at any time in history, from any continent, it is just a positioned document of a point in time that may be on site or not. It has captured something, and there is always a modest history of what happened before and what happened after on that site. For me, Borderlands looks at that point in time and tries to feather it out a bit. I think that the paintings in this exhibition are fluid and fluvial in nature. Once one spends time with them and really looks at them and builds a relationship with them, that time capsule starts to be widened out and you can see a little bit extra of that unrecorded history.  You are always trying to feather out into those other areas.