Over the last year, I have developed the craving to compile a place for an ever-expanding collection of visual notations, in addition to my personal musings on my own paintings. My new Visual Notation posts will focus on Great Notations and Contemporary Visionists, highlighting painters from then and now who depict the world out there through the process of perception – the mind filtering that takes place as we see, touch, feel, smell or hear something, along with the contemplations, recollections, aesthetic reactions, intuitions and phantasmic proposals of possibility that the mind performs. These perceptual painters are concerned with exploring and learning something more about this world we live in, but cannot be called realist painters in the way known today. They are not interested in painting reality exactly as they see it, for seeing is only one element of the senses. They are humanists, concerned with what the gift of life might mean, and they labor with sincerity, earnestness, humility and arrogance to try to represent it. They stand out for me because they have a gift of acute and broad vision that goes beyond just a delight in the surface of things to the deeper, higher, beautiful abstractions holding everything together, both in the natural world and in the picture plane. They are seriously consumed by the infinite potentials of rectangles and the juxtapositions of colors and shapes within it, and they paint, in my opinion, as if their heart depended on it.

For those of you who have subscribed to my painting blog (the blog tab at the top), you will continue to receive those posts directly to your email, as well as the new visual notation posts. I hope you will enjoy them all. For those new here, please feel free to take a look around and if you wish to receive posts by email, simply click the subscription button below.

The image to the right is a clip from an astounding fresco piece that I came across in Naples at the Museo Archeologico this June. The full painting, down below, depicts the Trojan horse being dragged victoriously into the city of Troy in utter celebration, unaware of the doom to come from the Greeks. There are uncountable art treasures around the world, but these figures and shadows threw me into a time-traveling warp so jolting that I think I may have permanent whiplash.