Bid farewell to the clockface

I paint like a printmaker. This is one of those little insights that is so completely obvious that I never saw it until I saw it all at once. A happy fixation with offsets, layered constructions where the layering is part of the point. Selecting discrete colors in limited pallets that play specific roles. Welcoming and incorporating the residue of iteration. Emphasizing the linear and the diagrammatic. Wiping the dark away to create light that seems to emerge from the forms rather than ricocheting off of them.

This one even looks more like a monotype than a bog-standard acrylic. The shimmery liquid substrate anyway. I was looking at it one day and it suddenly resolved into something like a photograph taken top down, close up, straight into the bottom of an aluminum pan, a picture of a piece of delicate jewelry suspended on the surface of a few centimeters of water about to simmer, held up by the water tension, casting warbled shadows in the kinetic shallows.

The title for this one derived from seeing that there are twelve interwoven inward facing loops arranged like the numbers on an analog clockface, and then realizing that this type of clock face will get more and more rare, until, after only a few generations more, and it will be a piece of strange nostalgia, like a phone chord, or a tube tv, or a jalopy. It will still have been a thing longer than cars will end up being a thing. Or jobs using computers.

Looking down from time’s equivalent of a stratospheric perspective at the course of human history spanning both directions from now, cars will have been a brief foray into an aberrant way of living. They will have been the central organizing principle of human life for a dozen or so decades maybe, all told, but that’s it. You can already see the wheel turning away from them. Not from the need to travel long distances quickly, but from the human driven automobile being the means. What else do we think of as a permanent foundational given of human experience, without which life would be unimaginable, that is nothing of the sort? And conversely, how long has there been, in the form we would easily recognize it, pie?

60”x36”
acrylic on canvas
available
send inquiries to russ@russbaileystudio.com