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JOHN OLSON on CHRISTOPHER PATCH |
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John Olson
Patch Work A painting is an idea, a slice of consciousness, thought caught in glass. Thin black lines creating a hymn to intellectual beauty, the volume of a large room developed in a rhetoric of wood and glass. The mountains in the background are distant because nothing in life is rehearsed. Our yearning for the beyond is swallowed in light. Electricity humming in fog. There is a decorum in silver we do not find in straw. Equations tasting of magnetism make life a circumstance of volume, scraps of real estate, the weight of a mood uplifted by nuance and hue, plaid patterns and stripes in chintz. Here in the reading room the philosophy of space is wrestled into speech. Air is mostly momentum unless it is agitated by words, by breath, by the flickering play of hue and pitch, an abyss in your eyeball, sumptuous celebrations of green behind a wall of glass. The physics of intimacy suggest it is personal to sweat but sublime to think the outer world of nature can wiggle in the mind like someone’s reflection in a cup of coffee. The awful shadow of some unseen power floats through unseen among us. This is why we go to the mountains for renewal. There is redemption in breath, grace in space. The glide of the painter’s brush causes a chair to emerge, a milieu of calm and casual conversation, kneecaps and eyebrows. Pin your eyes to the moment. Bring yourself to entertain an open consideration of distance. There is more to a line than a line. There are gradations of green, a river of light folded into a table, a fluent play between inner and outer. Squares of light like pages in a book. Folded hands, relaxed postures. Cubes, curves, cones. A sphere of reverie lavish with glass. |
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