Phillip Larrimore

ARTIST STATEMENT

These are paintings which can be literally looked into, layer by layer, with altering fields of depth, which change according to the angle of approach, and which recombine when one stands still. They are in a real sense a record of problems set and problems solved. My first work originated in a fascination with Leonardo's deluge drawings, which seemed to x-ray the motion of water and animate it on a page. How to make the visual equivalent of the polyphonic music of the Renaissance was my other initial concern. I wanted to make a painting like a fugue. I wanted to make a painting which the viewer animated. And I wanted to do this using little or no technology, unlike a hologram. My first work was studies of fire and water. Someone compared them to animated Monets. I have since explored depth, and pattern, perspectival space and multiple perspectives, architectural subject matter, and most recently realist and figurative work, all of this building to the future work I hope to do. Several meticulous copies of Audobons executed on six scrim layers were done in order to understand wing structure and pterolography-- or the proper placement of feathers--prefatory to paintings I plan to do representing birds in flight. A long-term obsession with Kaspar David Friedrich's "Arctic EXpedition" (improperly but more accurately called "The Wreck of The 'Hope'") lead to a series begun but not ended about the Shackleton expedition. And a sense that my more abstract pieces did not engage my sense of history, and historical tragedy, lead to a series of paintings --studies for an ongoing project--depicting the Dresden bombings and the killing fields of Cambodia. Each of these explores depth and space in a different way, according to the subject matter. To "pun" with the ship's riggings among the different layers of screen became part of the problem in the Shackleton paintings. To dimensionalize the shimmer of feathers of a great Tern. This is why I have gotten to human bodies only recently. Why do I work this way? My argument with artists statements--beyond the fact that the prose is usually execrable and the philosophy specious--is that we don't really know why we are haunted by certain questions and indifferent to others,and so such statements tend to be elaborate edifices around unanswered questions. Years ago, I did a year's drawings attempting to translate the imagery scintillating on what is called in Ashram circles "the third eye". Each dot of these drawings was done uttering a prayer. That seemed direly necessary then, and then it seemed something that I had learned to do, and no longer needed to do. Likewise the studies of water motion, of bird feathers, of Giambologna's Mercury Taking Flight--who I have skimming the waters of the Styx. Do the next thing.
PROCESS
The screen paintings initially used three to four layers of aluminum screening, each painted with a different but related image, which were hung at four inch intervals before and/or behind each other. The four layered paintings of this first period of my work hung 12 inches off the wall, the first screen usually being hung on the wall itself. I have consistently modified the process according to the area of inquiry and subject matter. The most "realist work" of the last year hangs four inches off the wall with an interval of an inch between each layer. The paintings investigating the use of perspective are about six inches deep[ but appear much deeper. The paintings investigating the play of pattern against pattern are about three inches deep. Usually the screens are hung with wire from the ceiling. I like to keep them "loose" so that the circulation of air causes them to "breathe".
MIRRORS
The mirrors are two panel corner pieces, each panel reflecting into each other. I have recently started to adapt some of these earlier pieces to make three-sided pieces in boxes.