Anchorage-based painter Graham Dane, originally from the UK, explores virology, bacteria, meteorology, cosmological imagery, chaos theory and notions of the sublime.

Artist Talk:

 

Artist Statement:

The works I make are found on the way to something else and are always unexpected. They’re informed at some level by daily experience, memories and certain aspects of the world (including virology, bacteria, meteorology, cosmological imagery), chaos theory, of the artist as (potential) shaman and an interest in the notion of the sublime.

We accept the abstract qualities of music to move us, transport us beyond the everyday world. It’s my belief that abstract painting, abstract art in general, has the same potentiality but in visual as opposed to aural terms. Consonance and dissonance of rhythm in pure painting, the play between contrasting forces and their coherence or unity, was for Wasilly Kandinsky the basis of the new ‘harmony’, as he concluded in Concerning the Spiritual in Art.

An abstract painting is rhythm touching feelings directly. No longer passing through objects of the world but passing over them, no longer depicting only fragments of reality, abstract painting, like music, is independent of the phenomenal world of objects. Abstract painting objectifies the will itself, directly (no longer indirectly through ‘mimesis’, the imitation of the phenomenal world) through its artistic means and their arrangement, also like music. It embodies pure rhythm, which takes place in time, whilst existing as an object in space.