Artist Statement - “Constant Witness” and other current work
The date I stopped painting is uncertain. I think it was more of a slow petering out. I simply began to spend less time making marks on a page and more time out in the land, walking around, looking at the horizon. When I wasn’t walking through the desert or the mountains I pined for them. And I knew that my desire to represent them two-dimensionally was just a stand-in for the real experience. Shifting to exclusive faith in materialism at the time, I came to distrust this attempt, how it removed the experience from reality, and reconstructed it on a surface after running it through the filter of my self.
I didn’t want to run the land through a filter I distrusted. I didn’t want to corrupt the experience in this way. But there’s tension in the fact that this very distrust often drove me to go out into the land and have those experiences. I went to look at the eternal and let myself blend into it, devaluing my personhood in favor of the nothingness. A stand-in for not existing at all. A yearning for the nothing there was before there was nothing. A wish for creation to not have been.
So I looked at the land, understanding this, and decided to try and represent just the nothing. I became interested in something more fundamental than land itself. What’s behind it all. The emptiness. So my paintings became more and more minimal. Gray surfaces with hints of variation. Celestial blobs of uncertainty. Nothing that hinted at something. Creation without the mind, without the self.
Returning to painting has required a shift in the way I think about my relationship to the land. I have to accept that my endeavor to go to the land for healing is the main narrative. I can’t represent the land without including this. So now I’m trying to represent the eternal in the distance. It still represents the nothing, the lack of existence, but now I’m included in the story, communicating with the nothingness. I am represented by human marks clearly made by my human hand.
The developing series “Constant Witness” envisions a dissolution of the self in the wilderness whereby I still end up somehow intact, whole, happy. The land itself is observed to be agential as the virgas that sweep across the desert and the varnish that stains the sandstone walls take on anthropomorphic appearances. Instead of devaluing my own personhood, I now flip the narrative, and the personhood of the land is recognized. It is always having its own experiences. Every juniper, raven, mule deer is found to be the constant witness of a place.
I recognize these things as a religious ceremony in adulation of worlds and lives outside of my own. I do so with gratitude and I do so in order to accept my need for healing.
— Ben Kilbourne
