Robert James Renwick     

Oh no, the painter's going to speak, almost always a bad idea.
What are they about? Well, they're pictures of bottles. I began making these last December on the dock next to the sailboat my wife and I just sold after a year and a half of cruising around the Bahamas and Florida. The rest were made at our apartment in Lincolnville.

On another level they're pictures of containers. They're vessels. They keep things in and they keep their surroundings out. They might be expressions of individuality. They might be characters. They might be interacting with each other and their environment.

While we're on the subject of pictures of things, they might be about how you glance at a scene in passing and don't take it in completely. Whether it's a bunch of stuff on a table, people in a room, or a landscape or even a painting, you don't need to examine every detail of it to come away with an impression and even years later you might have strong feelings attached to the memory of whatever it was.
It's the act of seeing that I'm grappling with. I'd like these to be more about that than what they happen to represent. You can show the same thing to a bunch of people and they will all come away with quite different impressions. I think that truth is subjective but on some level we all know it when we see it. I know that this is a contradiction. Working with these paintings is making me more comfortable with contradiction in general. I think it 's healthy to be comfortable with contradiction.

Beyond being pictures of things. Paintings are things themselves. At least I think a good painting has a strong sense of thingness about it. Paintings work for me when it doesn't matter if they're of anything or not. These are of things if you like. Some people think there is 'non-objective' painting. I don't care how abstract a painting tries to be, there will always be someone who sees something represented there. Like a Rorschach inkblot test. Even a white canvas will remind some people of bright light or something else. Even painters like Franz Kline and Jackson Pollock started off by representing things. Kline took details of interiors and blew them up. Pollock started his drip paintings by doodling little stick figures of people and dogs, then obliterating them. So you can hang your hat on these as pictures of stuff.

I'm trying to make sense of the flatness of these things. Playing with the way we want to see space inside what some call the 'picture box'. Some colors want to push forwards and some want to run away, they all do different stuff depending where they are, what they're up against and what you expect them to do. The planes and lines and colors and textures and the different way all of those reflect light all bring up associations and references. All of this stuff has unlimited combinations of subtle effects depending on the arrangements and relationships inside the paintings boundaries. I think that's enough for now.

Thanks for reading. Thanks for looking.
R J Renwick  
St Augustine  March 2008