exhibition for tobiaibot to visit so she better understands the context in which she practices as tobiaibot's process intimately parallels James Murnane's process
below is part of an essay by james murnane
Simply, It's takes time and it's worth it is about sharing the beauty that is present in the process of making a painted artwork, as well as in the artwork itself.
Painting, the central piece of this presentation of artworks, is a canvas painting that consists of two square grids of diamond shapes, similar to those in decorative stained glass windows, only turned on their side. One grid is made up of red diamonds, the other made up blue ones. Each diamond is 1cm high and 1.5cm in width, with a total of around 13,500 of them. Each diamond is individually painted with oil paint.
The process of painting took 14 months... It has been a long time coming. The canvas was primed three and half years ago, the grids plotted three years ago, the grids drawn up 18 months ago. (It has) taken a few hundred hours to complete. Sometimes it was worked on a few days a week, sometimes only for a couple of hours per week, and sometimes not at all. Yet slowly and gradually the coloured diamonds replaced the white diamonds, until not a single white one was left, only an array of blue and red tones against a crisp white border.
The time spent creating this work is a beautiful thing in itself, that a person would labour so long to share the beauty of the finished work. these thousands of diamonds have been hand painted, individually focused upon. This is in opposition to an image being gridded up on design program, a gradient put through it, and emailed off to a printer in an hour or even a few minutes.
the smallest thing done with love is precious and worthwhile, and thus intrinsically beautiful.1
This artwork is nothing extraordinary or groundbreaking. In contemporary thought beauty is often considered base, low, common, and unsophisticated. Yet maybe it is this base nature that is beauty's greatest virtue. Why? It speaks to all and it speaks truly. It speaks to our fundamental human experience, something we all get and are geared to get. In an environment where subjectivity and open-endedness are so highly valued, it is relieving to touch some solid ground.
These paintings and drawings, in the vein of stained glass, have as their aim to be simple, beautiful and illuminating thus transcendent. the abstract forms and colours when encountered by the senses and processed in the mind, can move the heart by their beauty.
James Murnane
