The Worlds of My
Imagination
By Morgan
Stephenson
We
can only see this world. So, we might
take it for granted, thinking that this is the only one. What if this isn’t
so? What if instead of there being one
world, one earth, there are instead many worlds. An infinite number of possibilities realized
in an infinite number of universes. What do these worlds look like? How much different can they possibly be? My work is about the wondrous possibilities
that exist in our imaginations, and perhaps somewhere out there. Like an archaeologist looking for fossils, I
am uncovering hidden worlds. “Go then,
there are other worlds than these (King 191).”
In Stephen King’s The Dark Tower, a man named Roland is on a quest for
The Dark Tower, which serves as a linchpin for all realities. He is on the
quest not only to save the tower from falling, plunging all of reality into
chaos, but to climb its steps and get answers to his questions. Like Roland, I’m on a quest, to use my
imagination to explore the multiverse.
In exploring the multiverse, I’m interested in
depicting the human form. There are
people or just a person in each work navigating their surroundings in these
worlds. Some of these people may be
native to these worlds, while others may have slipped through a thin space and arrived
by accident, most works are just a portrait, emphasizing that it is the people
who are different, not just the world. In
addition to the portraits, two of the paintings will depict scenes from these
worlds, events. I believe that having
people in the painting will help to understand them, the people and the worlds
they occupy. When I say understand them,
I don’t mean try and break down the fundamental physics of a parallel world. I mean the viewer should start to imagine a
narrative that would lead to the image that is in front of them. It may be vague, a bit sketchy, but it should
serve the viewer with a point of departure from the image.
I will use paintings as avenues of transport
to these other worlds. For my paintings
I believe that color would be a good way to distinguish and differentiate each
world from one another. Some worlds may
be more naturalistic as far as the color scheme is concerned, but maybe not. Others will appear more exotic and dangerous
as the colors in these worlds are colors that we don’t see often enough. Color is important to me because certain
colors are associated with certain things, so when you turn that on its head it
feels otherworldly.
One
of the possible problems I foresee is that people won’t understand what I’m
trying to do, that people won’t understand what I’m trying to do period, or
won’t find it interesting. I’m a little concerned that the narrative that I
rely on in order to make these paintings either won’t be important or that it
will seem solely important and they will be viewed as illustrations. The one thing that I think negates the latter
problem is the way I’ve presented the subject matter, it doesn’t look like an
illustration, or at least none I’ve ever seen. As to the first problem, I think
that as long as the viewer sees that there is an element of storytelling to the
paintings, I’ll be happy.
Although
I’m making up these alternate realities, Michio Kaku, a theoretical physicist,
believes that alternate realities are not so impossible:
I often think
that we are like the carp swimming contentedly in that pond. We live out our
lives in our own "pond," confident that our universe consists of only
the familiar and the visible. We smugly
refuse to admit that parallel universes or dimensions can exist next to ours,
just beyond our grasp. If our scientists
invent concepts like forces, it is only because they cannot visualize the
invisible vibrations that fill the empty space around us. Some scientists sneer at the mention of higher
dimensions because they cannot be conveniently measured in the laboratory (Kaku
5).
While
we don’t see other worlds, that does not necessarily mean they are not out
there.
Throughout my work I want something to tie it all
back to here, this world, this Earth. I
want a sense that these worlds while different are still connected. I want to think of it like a chain, the
further down the chain you go the more the differences add up. While links that are closer together will share
a lot of similarities, but are slightly different. In order to achieve this
sense of connectivity, I want to have references to culture in general. This will serve as my linchpin, holding these
worlds together. Some of these
references are vague, subtle, in your face, or only recognizable to people who
use the culture that is referenced. Some might not seem like references at all,
like using the human figure in a painting. I’m interested in little nods to
popular culture but also want to provide a certain narrative quality to the
work. Some references will consist of stylistic ways I depict the people/events
in the painting. Some references will
allude to a particular event, while in some, there may be no instantly visible
references besides that I’m depicting people, some of whom may be known and
others not. In addition, just having
similar things to this world is enough of a reference to assume that despite
differences in color and rendering, these are people I’m depicting, and people,
no matter how different, share similar concerns and traits.
I
want to show different worlds, but have them be just close enough for you to
compare the world of one painting with the other. Even if it’s as simple as
comparing how I handled the paint compared to another painting, or the size
difference perhaps meaning that one has more significance. This is why I choose
to hang the “dot” paintings because they shared a similar language. The dots
imply that there is something similar to all these worlds I’ve depicted, even
if that similarity is in how I painted them. One person said that it looks like
the people in my paintings all have a weird disease. I like that, that people
can make their own associations with my paintings and project something onto
them, perhaps making another story. The colors and dots for me is just a way of
representing something foreign and not understood in a visually appealing way.
The paintings are bright and full of color, and whatever is going on in the
space of the painting relies on those color combinations to do something to the
viewer. Whether it’s you think they’re diseased, they’re just colorful, weird,
the color adds something to the paintings that make you think about these
people that I have depicted. I want to give you the idea that there is much
stranger things that can happen, and that these happenings are what our science
fiction, horror, and fantasy stories are about. My paintings are weird, but
that is only a reflection of the real world influences that make them that way.
In
my paintings I want to have a child’s imagination, their sense of humor,
astonishment and fear. This is something that I want you to experience too.
Children are afraid of simple things, the dark, so a child would be afraid of
encroaching darkness, and be fearful that the darkness will envelope them. But,
the colors I use negate that, or make it seem less scary or serious. I hope
that when you look at my work, you get a feeling of being a child again.
Whether it’s beautiful or terrifying, I want you to experience it on a
childlike level. I hope that with the
combination of color, the narrative and the connectedness of these paintings
that you will enjoy them in all their complexity and weirdness, and wonder
about the possibilities. That like children, they will embrace it, not discard
it as fantastical nonsense. Like a child, most imaginative things begin with
“what if?”
The
narrative in these works is inherent, they either come to me naturally or they
begin to develop as I begin to work on the painting. For some paintings, I just
started painting and then the story developed through painting. Some things are
dependent on the story, like leaving certain spaces in a painting blank. The
way I had structured how I was going to make the paintings was to make a list
of possibilities. These possibilities ran from silly, like Dracula being a
diabetic, to Lovecraftian where there would be monsters with tentacles. I had a list of about sixty possibilities for
paintings. Most involved a narrative, but some were just things I wanted to
paint, like a deformed hand. I always loved picture prompt’s in high school.
The teacher would give you a picture than you would have to make up a story
from that picture. Here, I was working in reverse, having already developed a
story, even if it is vague, then working on the painting. The trouble with that
was that when it came time to paint some of these, like what if a boy could
fly, I wouldn’t be interested. In the case of the boy who could fly, I felt a
little to tied to the narrative and the certain way I wanted it depicted, that
when I couldn’t depict it that way, I gave up. So, I started just making
paintings, with some general idea, no really developed story (except for
Gadhafi), and started painting. Then, the story came to me as I was discovering
the painting. If a drip happened, running down the face of a woman, I left it.
From there, the idea that this woman was in a sort of change, she was melting,
began to form. From there I kept painting and the story got more clear and
concise as I neared completion.
The first painting idea I had for this project
was of Muammar Gaddafi. I had this idea as far back as my junior review, when I
was asked to write about what I would want to do for thesis, at the time I had
purposed alternate histories, similar to what I’m doing now. The only
difference is that I would’ve taken watershed moments, important moments and
changed them, thus making an alternate history. I felt kind of disgusted by how
Gaddafi died, and how the people around him took great pleasure in doing harm
to him. I’m not saying he was or was not a bad person, but seeing someone beg
and plead for his life on YouTube makes you feel a little sorry for him. So,
then I thought that if people would do this to a man, would they do it to a
child, if they knew that child would grow up to be someone bad, perhaps like
Gaddafi.
In
Stephen King’s 11/22/63 a character,
a schoolteacher Jake Epping goes back in time to stop Oswald from killing John
F. Kennedy. Time travel is pretty
complicated, as demonstrated when Jake asks his friend in time travel the
ultimate time travel paradox: “Yeah, but what if
you went back and killed your own grandfather?" Jake has a good point, but
his friend has an even better one: "Why the fuck would you do that? (King 67).”
So, going of the time travel idea, I then developed this complicated
story: a man gets a chance to go back in time and change the past. He chooses
to stop Mumar Gadhafi from becoming the man he died as. So, our hero has two
options, kill the child, the perhaps easiest option, or try to change
something, some key event in that child’s life, to set him on a different path.
Our hero chooses the less noble of his options, but finds out to late that he
can’t kill the child. Well, someone overhears him, in the past, talking to
someone, a trusted friend. This eavesdropper knows the child of which our hero
speaks, and decides that he will be the hero and kill the child. So our new
hero gathers some of his buddies and kills the child. Our original hero is
devastated and returns to the present, to find nothing has changed. Muammar Gaddafi
was still killed on October 20, 2011.
Our
hero then discovers with the help of a mysterious stranger who knows more than
anyone should that it was never going to work. The past is self-correcting; it
will fight any changes attempted. The only real way to change something, to
kill someone and have it change the whole timeline, is to recreate the events
surrounding that person’s death. The person can die in any way, within reason,
but it is the ritual that is important. This is why you could never go back and
stop Hitler, or Gaddafi, because you could never recreate the circumstances
surrounding a person’s death. You could never produce Gaddafi’s gun and parade
it around while dragging his body through the streets. You could also never
recreate the technology available today back then to let everyone and their
mothers see his death. That is why I’ve left those three objects white, because
the white canvas to me represents their absence. I think that this is a plausible way to
explain time travel, and why you couldn’t change anything, because you would
have to do so much work and it might not even work.
All the stories I have made up are more
or less developed. The Gaddafi story is by far the most elaborate. In the
portraits I am showing something either happening to the sitter or having the
sitter look familiar, albeit oddly. In the man with the baby hand, as I call
it, I imagine that this man has found the literal Fountain of Youth. It’s taken
him many years but he’s finally found it, and is eager to drink from its live
sustaining waters. He’s drunk from it and is gazing at himself in the waters of
the fountain, waiting for the change to come. It does come, but in an
unexpected way. Parts of his body begin aging backward at different rates. I
imagine this man is about 80 years old, has none of his hair, and looks like a
bag of wrinkles. You see that his read hair has come back, but his hand has
shrunk to the size of a child’s, even though it still holds the wrinkles he had
at age 50. His forehead has smoothed out and his eyes appear clear and more
alert. That is where you are left, to look at this man touching his face and
staring at himself. You are left hanging, what else happens? Well, it’s
open-ended, anything can happen; maybe he’ll be a really weird Benjamin Button
for the rest of his life. Or perhaps the process will even out and he’ll
forever remain at a youthful age. I want to leave that part of the narrative up
to the viewer.
Now,
it is possible that you won’t see the narrative in some of these paintings, or
won’t think it matters. I feel that these stories matter to me, and to the way
I made this body of work. What’s important to me doesn’t have to be important
to you. You may just think they’re colorful portraits and scenes and they’re
weird. That’s fine. For example, when I showed the Man with the Baby Hand, people seemed to think that it was an
interesting portrait, it was weird, but no one commented on what might be
happening to the sitter, which I’m fine with. I want you to enjoy looking at them, at the
color combinations, at the way it was painted. If you do happen see a story
peeking through somewhere in my paintings, that’s fine too, great even.
My first response to my own paintings is the
color, and how it makes the portraits and figures appear stranger. Then, of
course, I look at them longer and start putting together bits and pieces that
form a story, although for some paintings the story is not always coherently
put together. Something else that interests me is a sense of not knowing where
these portraits and scenes take place. For this, I’ve decided to not have a
background, just a dark color. I want the focus to be on the subject. In only
one painting, Dirty Harry Alien Messiah, do I leave some idea of where this is
taking place, although it’s not clear, and a bit blurry. Despite this one
loophole, I want you to think that these events or portraits couldn’t be
happening just anywhere; it’s some place special, someplace different. Also, I
want the people in the paintings to be important, so the plain backgrounds seem
to help the paintings achieve that.
My
paintings are spaced fairly close together in the gallery with about a foot of
space between each painting. The
portraits are smaller, around 22x24, with the largest being 32x36. The two
larger paintings are a little less than four feet for the painting with the two
women, and the Gadhafi painting is four feet square. Some people said that it might benefit from a
reduction, but I thought it was kind of nice. It gives the feeling that these
paintings present worlds that are close to each other, in how things are
represented, but still far enough apart to be their own world. The transition
between one large painting then smaller portraits then finally another large
painting makes it seem like the larger paintings are bookends, holding the
portraits up. I think I would have been happy just showing the portraits, but I
feel that if I had I wouldn’t have been as satisfied. I want to show that there
are more to these worlds than just a face in the middle of the canvas, and I
believe I’ve done an adequate job changing that dynamic with the two larger
scene paintings.
For my exhibition, I had wanted to include
everything I had done during my senior year. Upon seeing the space I realized
that was not going to happen. The presentation of my paintings in the gallery
is something that I’m concerned about. I don’t want them to appear too crowded
together but I want them to be close enough so you see that these paintings
have a relationship. At first I thought I would try to fit nine to ten
paintings on both walls. I found out that while hanging that certain pieces
just looked better and flowed better than with others. There was also the fact
that I couldn’t hang nine paintings within the pace without it appearing
stuffed or too stacked. The two big
paintings and the four portraits I hung had a better connection to each other
than any of the other pieces I thought of hanging. Again, I believe this is
because of the stylized dots I used to create color combinations and add a
certain sense of light. I’ve used these dots and lines in different ways
throughout the six paintings, but this factor seems to unite them. I had wanted
to use references to culture in the paintings, which I have done, but not to
the degree first intended. It was hard trying to force certain references I
wanted into a certain painting. It felt unnatural, so I stopped doing it that
way and let the references be there if they must, I didn’t want to force them
upon the painting. The most blatant references are to famous people, being
William H. Macy and Clint Eastwood.
As
with all things, there is always criticism. Some people said that the lack of
color in the background is a good choice, a sensible choice, but it still seems
to be lacking in comparison to the strong colors of the portraits/ foreground.
In Dirty Harry Alien Messiah, the
color is in the background, and it works in some ways better than the mixed
black background of the other portraits/scenes. In hindsight, I think I could
have just had five paintings, as the portrait of the two women being consumed
by darkness seems to be the one that doesn’t fit. The colors fit, but as Hanneline
pointed out, the way I’ve depicted the figures seems generic, whereas with the
rest of my paintings there is specificity to the way I’ve depicted the figures.
I tend to work better if I have a reference of some sort, something with
detail, that way I have more wiggle room with how I’m depicting the subject.
For some paintings, I didn’t use any reference, and you can tell, because some
things like the depiction of the female figure looks generic. Another criticism
is that some things look more considered than others. A nose or mouth might be
nicely rendered and interesting while areas such as the hair or clothing seem
less considered, or like I didn’t know how to handle those aspects. This is
true; hair and clothing are not something that I’m very good at rendering like
I can do with the figure and the face. All I can do is try to find a way to
make it work better in my future work. One final thing that can be said is that I
don’t really look at painting while I’m painting. I’m in my own little bubble,
but I hope to burst that bubble as I move forward with my art. Overall, people
I’ve talked to seem to enjoy my paintings and the use of color and the various
ways I’ve rendered the subjects and the overall strangeness that is present.
Is the grass greener on the other
side? Well, perhaps. Some worlds will be better than ours, more stable, more
peaceful, with wonderful colors and interesting characters; while others may be
inhospitable, chaotic, a complete mess, filled with monsters we only know from
our dreams. Others still may drive us insane, simply because we would realize
that our ideas of how things work would no longer be relevant. I want you to
imagine what is going on is these paintings, and perhaps make a little story
that goes along with my paintings. I want the audience to judge these worlds; I
want them to ask themselves would life be better or worse here or there. I want
you to judge these worlds in these paintings against each other, not only in
terms or story but in terms of the art itself. Is one painted better than the
other, what might that say about the artist’s attitude towards this painting,
that world in that painting? I want to
give a varying sense that while the grass may seem greener on the other side
and sometimes it may be, sometimes the grass may have teeth that will bite if
you’re not careful.
