Addition

When our paintings are reproduced on the Internet, many of us believe that it is a ridiculous waste of time to be overly concerned with accurate reproductions. In fact, we have a deep understanding of photography as a vehicle for lies. You can tweak your colors and crop your margins, but a photograph still can’t reproduce a painting. Imagine the compounding complications of the Internet. Every audience member has a unique window/monitor for viewing the image. Every painting has texture that can’t be simulated (yet). Every painting reflects light, while every monitor emits light. With paintings on the Internet, what you see is not what you get.
We have a new painting in our house. When selecting the painting from a web page on the Internet, I understood that I was being seduced by the illustrative subject matter (not to be confused with the painting’s content or meaning) and that the actual object would prove to be more enriching. That is not to say that the nostalgic rendering of a badger sizing-up a caterpillar is without value. Add the title Come, Armageddon! Come! and you have got some All-American cognitive dissonance. Whose Armageddon is coming? My seven year old is convinced that the badger is about to squish the caterpillar. On the other hand, being the underdog champion that I am, I suspect (or hope?) that the cocksure badger is under-estimating its legislated position of authority.
I chose this painting by Timothy Buckwalter (which is 32 x 32” square) because I sensed a story and, more importantly, an object, that flickered with liminality. Timothy’s process is succinctly described in a recent post over at his blog. Nothing in what he reveals surprises me. I had suspected that Timothy had used pewter paint for his mid-tones, but it turns out that he uses graphite paint instead. Basically, my technical suspicions have been confirmed, and yet, the over-all vibe of the painting continues to put me betwixt and between. The painting is not a smooth polished surface, nor is there the goopy evidence of Action Painting. The ground, although crafted enough to eliminate the tooth of the canvas, reveals the holidays and hairs of a calculated nonchalance.What surprises me is that I have always assumed (and it turns out correctly) that Timothy is my age. I can logically explain the spacing of his tacks and the two-tone purple glow of his backgrounds better then I can explain the kinship I feel towards his paintings. Staring at this object in my dining room, I sense a true Gen-exer. Not the commodified/mtv/extreme/ Reagan-era version of Gen-x but the definitive Douglas Coupland defined population. I simply knew that Timothy Buckwalter was born between 1960 and 1966 by looking at our new painting. We have been bracketed by a nostalgia that is not our own and trampled by a commercialized culture that is as equally foreign. We were the first generation to fantasize about a nuclear Armageddon and yet we are still here.