gravity

[French gravité, heaviness, from Old French, from Latin gravits, from gravis, heavy; see gwer-1 in Indo-European roots. small right corner of 36" x 36", Gravity -  in progress. when i was a kid my favorite book was The Light Princess. this i my copy. it cost $1.25. in the story, the princess loses her ability to be held by gravity. i found this fascinating because gravity is the primary law of attraction. we gravitate to an earthy pull. as a kid with a wild imagination, i fretted over the possibility to lose one's pull.  but she floated and giggled and grew and played and found mischief. without gravity, late at night, she would float down to her lake and swim, enjoying one of the second elements: water. water held her. a deep dark lake, bottomless and lucid only at the surface. without the law of attraction how would she find the dirt that makes us heavy and human: earth.  without gravity how would she find love?  without tactility at her feet how would she see with a whole body?  i thought she had nothing and from nothing was free to create something.  she finds love in a deep, dark lake.  a volume so heavy and dark it mirrors the air.  (of course there is a prince. of course he loves her for her darkness and light.) but even later in the story, when she eventually reunites with the earth, every night she returns to the lake to float. weightless.  what i still find attractive about this story, after 20 something years is that gravity would have gotten in her way as she grew. so what does this have to do with painting?  once gravity got in my way for years and years. it was good and i went on a journey. in the end the love of the deep, dark lake won. painting is my lake. i am ever more fascinated with the instability of ground, heaviness and our inability to truly contain the physical markers we hold dear to remain grounded:  horizon lines  (we never get there folks, the horizon is a wiggling, spinning construct. it is always in the distance). di-urinal shifts in light and temperature landscape as a constructed trope cracks and fissures surface as a tenuous film the infinite expanse of scale heaviness sound as color. we think we know what these things are, just as we are confident gravity will keep us safely bound to the heaviness of the ground.  i am happy to announce i am back in my lake. painting full time, against gravity yet heavy, human and deeply curious.