"On The Origin of Image"

A Postmodern Treatise On The Construct-Essence, Specity

My first choice of titles for this new treatise (a compilation of essays) was to be The Final Manifesto of Art, as each section relates in subtle ways to our highly evolved conceptions of image and the complex history of both the presentations and classifications of it.

 

At first, the justification for that initial title was very clear to me. I was certain that I had discovered what was to be visual art's most complete and comprehensive subject matter to date, one that literally exposed the "time and place" and the "how and why" visual art came into play in its clever association with evolution's advent of consciousness.

The notion that it was more important to define a fresh ideation first as an alternative subject matter for artists soon became secondary to exposing the idea as a mechanism that impacts every corner of Life, not just hominid's proprietary conceptions of our surroundings being generated by the calculating lure of visible light – and our unique translations of that light.

The following is an excerpt from the work's Premise that hopefully provides insight into the objectives of this painter's literary adventure:

 

"The significance of any space-time relationship is often placed on the back burner, in a sense, of any progressive introspection – inasmuch as we eagerly observe and record events and their sequencing over time, but we don’t always effectively associate or connect the critical 'sequencing aspect' of nature to any underlying objectives or meaning that might still be hiding from us, particularly from a contemporary artist's considerations.

In short, this treatise will highlight a solitary and highly intriguing feature of nature that’s actively being portrayed throughout each of nature’s vision-based displays and their subsequent interpretations. And that one thingness that we are going to identify essentially sustains and focuses nature’s own span of attention, nature's own persistent gestures of self-examination, if you will. Within this treatise we are going to be (theoretically) dissecting nature's unending renditions of itself, initially as experienced through nature's clever expressions we call art.

But at the same time, this feature, in a more stealth kind of way, effectively recedes into the background of our lives on a daily basis, as the feature has been carefully formatted to remain out of pedestrian view. Of course, that’s by design too, much like all the other mysteries that artists often find hiding, most surprisingly, right in front of our eyes. I’m guessing that there are a lot of things that are still waiting to be discovered by artists, especially from within those slippery realms of creativity and visual art. This just happens to be another one of those curious things about nature that artists will soon be able to capture and formally expose for the entertainment of others."

 

– David Orr Wright

Book cover concept

Schedule to be published in 2018