Liquid Villa
Liquid Villa depicts dreamlike states using a combination of architectural and abstract imagery. I refer to this work as "time-based painting", and employ a painterly sensibility and process to create images that transform over time.
Liquid Villa begins with a series of patterns in deep, aquatic tones overlaid with an intermittent glowing vertical stripe or ray. This imagery eventually disintegrates to a view across a pool of water in an imaginary villa. This structure is in turn subsumed by a pale fog. When the fog dissipates, the scene has been reconfigured back into an abstraction. The fog, the abstract imagery, and the architecture are protean, slowly mutating into one another or recombining to create a sense of instability and unease.
In creating this work the element of the glowing ray was an intuitive inclusion, and it began to take on characteristics that were for me part spiritual, painterly, and Hollywood sublime. The ray became a potential visual cue for philosophical concepts such as 'transformation from within’ or 'living in the present', or 'the eternal return'. Alternately, it could simulate a B-movie special effect designed to signify a phantom presence, or some sort of defense designed to protect the work from specific interpretation.
Jeremy Blake, February 2001