The Study of Where is Near
The Study of Where is Near
Nick Wade
The painted forms are the reslut of an accumulation of influences. The camera obscura has been a site of intereste for years, primarily because of the experience of that environment gives one the opportunity to see one’s self in the act of perception or to see one’s self inside the eye, sight being privileged beyond all other sense.
To make a hole in a box is literally to make a camera, the Italian word for room is “camera”.
A simple shelter, which offers some bodily security can be seen as a cell for contemplation of what it is to be human.
To it and muse in such a space is to engage the enclosure in the way the whole structure (imagine a hut) and its parts answer the needs of the human body…protection, visual position, warmth perhaps, breath also. You name the others.
Pre-Renaissance Italian painting, as well as being a period during which religious figures were depicted in various states of detachment and isolation from daily culture is also fascinating for artists’ methods of rendering architecture, interior space the human body and natural forms. The particularities of architectural rendering which occur in the work of artists such as Giotto have been of great interest.
But it was seeing the painting from 1760-75, “St Jerome in his Study” , by Antonello Da Messina which made me think of using the board which I have used to this point*…among other things.
The board I am using has a dimensional stability that appeals to me and when kept from shock and moisture, continues to present as a thin but stable mass rather than a layered sheet. Having constructed a number of works with this material. I prefer Medite II to MDF as Medite is made without formaldehyde.
The painting of box-like architectural and optical images on box like supports come from an intuitive place. There is an attempt in the design stage where I attempt to include the support material through both its colour presence and as a visual and structural foundation. (And a location where the light comes in).
*(Loosely, Antonello rendered the matrerial of St. Jerome’s study as something which I could identify only as Medium Density Fibreboard, MDF).