DAVID LUKSHA
For the past twenty-five years oil paint and wax have been a constant in my studio practice. Layers of wax and oil paint are applied in succession; opaque and transparent paint surfaces become suspended in the wax, which is alternately poured and brushed, torched and melted. The inherent capacity of wax to change under certain conditions has always been of paramount import to the underlying concepts being considered.
Since moving to the west coast over ten years ago, the influence of nature has combined with my desire to examine the effect of memory on the psychological experience of seeing. As my work is created over long periods of time; marks, images and surface conditions come and go, leaving fragments of visual experience behind. I liken these remaining fragments to patches of meaning, sensory experiences that have been transformed by time, circumstance and resultant memories. Memory, like nature, is in a continual state of flux: birth, growth, death and re-birth are constants. The work is therefore rooted in the exploration of how memory, in this case visual memory, is built upon a sense of impermanence and change. The images are meant to trace visual memory devoid of or refusing mimetic form, hovering on the verge of disclosure. As a participating viewer, one is left to muse over a mixture of possibilities … possibilities created in part by one's own history and point of view.
|