All Awash With Gimmicks ...

There was a time when I painted on mirrors; a professor suggested (their job to criticize, right?) the mirror was just a gimmick. I could defend the mirrors, albeit, they were not entirely successful in relation to the concept that engendered them. At the time, I was obsessed with the idea of painting empty space -- the actual air between objects, not as air particles, not the objects visible in the negative space between focal point objects -- and kept getting stuck on painting the objects themselves as definers of the empty space between them. I wanted to navigate the space between the objects without being dependent on painting the objects. Because mirrors reflect the space of their surroundings, I painted on them, maintaining unpainted areas of reflection and blotting out other areas with paint. The result was some areas of deeper space, and some odd incongruities between painted image and reflected surroundings depending on where the mirrors were displayed. But more important, there is space between the reflection of marks on the surface of a mirror and the marks themselves, a kind of in between area that I could ponder as empty space or transitional space between the real world surroundings and the image world, albeit it's a very narrow band. There's a whole history of the mirror in paintings, which I was thinking about simultaneously, but I won't digress. I watched this transitional space develop as paint touched the mirror. Cracks that developed in the mirror also reflected themselves, with that same small space between the cracks and their reflections. I learned from my mirror work, which is enough for it to be more than a gimmick; Sometimes, all process can do is teach something, open up new ideas and perceptual lens.

The professor's question was a good one, even if he may have been being contrary for the sake of making me defend my work. The mirrors weren't being received by him in a visual way that suggested concept. It's entirely too easy to rest on gimmicky techniques.

I stopped with the mirrors because they were too fragile, reducing their portability, which at the time was important to me.