NEW WEBSITE

I have made a new website on tumblr that I will be using as my main portfolio. So here it is:
http://stephenwevans.tumblr.com/

I hope to be changing it to a .com soon...

YES

“I want to create an atmosphere that can be consciously plumbed with seeing...like the wordless thought that comes from looking in a fire.”
--James Turrell

3-IN-1 PAINTING: "THE SECOND DAY"

The Second Day, 2012

Latex and florescent spray-paint on canvas

73x72"

This newer painting, now titled "The Second Day," had me a little stumped for while, and though I had a rough idea as to what I was trying to accomplish, it was still largely a mystery. So, I took some time one day recently to sit down in front of it and write some notes down in my notebook, and came to a better understanding of what this piece means to me and what it's all about:

Perhaps it is raising the awareness of the vast interconnectedness of the space in which we inhabit and the eternal space of the universe. This is highlighted. It’s remembering the big picture and how fascinating it all really is. Because the piece is read as one thing, though it is comprised of three elements: the two painted panels and the third being the wall itself. It becomes not a division of material, but rather a uniting. Perhaps it is bringing to light that eternity is a reality, and closer at hand than we give notice. It is very easy to forget the massive place in which we live in, and our relation to it. I’d like to draw attention to that because of how humbling it can be.

Relation, I think, is one of the most important things because it is what connects us all as humans. As surgeon and author Sherwin Nuland brings to attention that the things that relates humans universally, no matter where you grew up, or what side of the world you’re on, is the basic biological make up that we all share that comprise our needs, wants, pains, and emotions, and ultimately an understanding. In his own words he says that it is these things that humans “share by virtue of the physical properties of their body and kind of brain they have, which bring out certain sorts of strivings, certain sorts of emotional needs that are indeed universal.” I think it’s the awareness of these things that make you feel smaller in a larger place, and draws attention to beauty of “the big picture.” Awareness and the spirit are becoming synonymous for me. The feeling of awe when encountering nature, a newborn, and the awareness of relation to a person, place, or thing brings about things in us that are very unrelated to nature and are abstract at that. This being said, it arouses the question as to how it all came to be. Why is there something rather than nothing? (This a question you will see pop up a lot on here I think.)

James Turrell's "Roden Crater"

In a way, it relates to James Turrell’s “Roden Crater” in the respect that you feel more in your place, when faced with such a vast space, viewing the stars in such a way that you feel yourself turning instead of the stars, which is the reality. In this sense you feel like you are stepping into a great space and perhaps realizing, or feeling, your smallness. In a sense, the “space” in the painting is scaleless and infinite, and relates to the Crater in this way. In the painting, it is seeing all the parts as a whole, and all of time at once. 

The Second Day (detail)

In C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, He states something rather profound in dealing with time and how it relates, or does not relate, to God. In chapter 25, entitled TIME AND BEYOND TIME, Lewis illustrates a rather abstract, yet basic understanding of the relation between both God and man’s journey in time, stating:

If you picture Time as a straight line along which we have to travel, then you must picture God as the whole page on which the line is drawn. We come to the parts of the line one by one: we have to leave A behind before we get to B, and cannot reach C until we leave B behind. God, from above or outside or all round, contains the whole line, and sees it all.

This painting, now titled “The Second Day”, relating to the Genesis narrative and the second day of creation, speaks onto this subject where heaven and earth/ land and sky are separated. But it is also the first morning, and the birth of the horizon. This line can be seen as a separation of things, or perhaps more optimistically, as a place where things are joined together.