Negative Capability, as defined by poet John Keats in 1817, is when humans are capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. This idea relates to aspects of both my processes and ideas in making paintings. My process is rooted in the combination of responding to random happening in the action of painting and careful arrangements of marks. Compositions develop through trust and discovery in the process of painting. Within my paintings forms appear to recede and emerge, float and dive, decay and develop in immeasurable spaces evocative of the sublime. These spaces express qualities related to bodies of water, sky, outer space, or somewhere in between. Like painters of the Romantic Movement, I seek to utilize the power of suggestiveness to stimulate the imagination.

Most compositions start with drips of paint in combination with direct observation of patterns and shapes found in organic objects-particularly rocks. Although painted forms are rooted in the geological world they often mimic other objects from nature- a hard rocklike form may simultaneously exhibit characteristics of a fragile egg, or a seed, or even microscopic organisms. They are less specific in order to reference the interconnectedness of all organic life.

French poet and critic Charles Baudelaire described Romanticism as “precisely situated neither in choice of subjects nor in exact truth, but in a way of feeling”. It is my hope that in the spaces of my paintings a hidden view of the world is revealed in small glimpses. While mystery and mood are important to my work I feel that it is also important to think of subject matter, but only in general terms. Because the space of these paintings is both an internal and external space (underwater, floating in the clouds, in outer space, and even inside the body)—one can think of many metaphors that create subject matter. But in the end, recognition of any of what may be specific subject matter is less important in my paintings than emotive qualities suggested by uncertain, dramatic compositions.

 

© 2008 Stephanie Palagyi