1...4...3...Means I Love You

I've been thinking about some of these pieces that I made while working in what I call a nautical theme.  It was a series of work that I started in 2001 or 2002.  There were a couple of pieces before this one that lead me to thinking about the language of the coast.  It was also after my grandmother's funeral in 2001.  She was buried in the Russian Orthodox tradition.  Two things began to happen over the course of a couple of years.  While I was at my grandmother's service I found the high key pallet and clarity of the Russian Orthodox icons and frescoes illuminating.  I could see all the colors used an how the color defined shape and helped create movement.  Something similar happened while I was back home in Hull visiting family and friends.  I would take these walks around the peninsular from XYZ street--beach side--and head along Nantasket Roads to the high school and back along to the bay past the coast guard, the village, the alphabet streets and cut across after the water tower back to the beach side and back down to XYZ street, all the while shooting Polaroid.  But what really impressed me was watching some of the big tankers come through Nantasket Roads.  This sounds silly, but what was amazing was that I could see them so clearly, all of the colors and shapes on the vessel were meant to be seen.  I noticed too that this was the case on smaller vessels too.  It's easy to see a boat on the water.  So these two experiences added up to a kind of clarity of sight. 
At the time I had been squishing a lot of paint on to surfaces and using computer generated images and my vision tended to be slightly blurry.  To see light and color with clarity was something that interested me.  I took that further step to think about the kinds of language one knows just by growing up in a certain area of the country.  In my case I was thinking about a tacit knowledge of the nautical. 
1...4...3...Means I love You uses the nautical symbols for the numbers 1, 4 & 3.  When I was in high school it was something one would use as a farewell in a note passed to a lover.  The myth was that Minot's light on calm evenings would flash this sequence of light (I recently read somewhere that the light is actually broken).  We transposed the sequence to represent the number of letters in the phrase I love you.
Each piece is approx 4 foot square.  I wanted the painting to be larger than life size and oriented on the landscape horizon so that it might somehow surround and embrace the viewer.  The piece took on some water damage from a leaky roof, so I peeled them apart, hammered grommets onto the canvas and added the addendum--version 3 Distressed State.  I like that they've become flags more than paintings.  And after all when isn't love sometimes a little ugly?

1...4...3