Moments of the Particle 142”X60”
This painting was a major shifting point in my perception of the world.
I started this painting in the beginning of 2020. I had just moved into the Church with nothing but a bed and a bag, I was working full time screen-printing, running the Airbnb at the church, and trying to help out wherever possible on the farm. There were whiffs of pandemic on the wind, but we were all still blissfully ignorant of what was to come.
I started with a chunk of ice that nearly fell on my head after a slog home in the dark. As the homicidal ice melted into the canvas I cleaned and changed the sheets for the next set of tenants coming to stay at the church. Chores finished, ice partially melted, I grabbed a beer, spit on the canvas, and started to mix in pigment.
The world turned itself inside out after this. I managed to sneak in one last trip to Seattle, and subsequently the San Juan islands with 3 of my favorite people, mere days before everything shutdown. Seattle airport being the first infection point in the US, shutting down the day after flying back to NY. I think about that timing often, what a difference a day can make, how far the ripples of change reverberate from such a coincidence.
2020 turned out to be the most tumultuous year of my life externally. However, if I can set aside the horror, combative partisanship, fear, and chaos it turned out to be a very positive time for me internally. I no longer had to fight my hermetic instincts, no one could go out anyway. I was forced to face a lot of things I had been ignoring about my habits, and thoughts. I got to just sit in the forest. Build fires. Make ponds. It was something to aspire to, this apocalyptic life.
It wound up taking the full length of the pandemic to finish. Not so much because of complexity, or technique, but it just didn’t want to be done for the longest time🤷♀️. Paintings are assholes like that sometimes.
In physics, a “moment” is a mathematical representation of the product of a force and perpendicular distance from the point of action of the force. For a particle it usually measures mass to produce a rotation about that point. I love the etymological clue of a new definition of moment. Space. Time.
“Momentum is a vector quantity: it has both magnitude and direction. Since momentum has a direction, it can be used to predict the resulting direction and speed of motion of objects after they collide. Below, the basic properties of momentum are described in one dimension. The vector equations are almost identical to the scalar equations (see multiple dimensions).
Single particle
The momentum of a particle is conventionally represented by the letter p. It is the product of two quantities, the particle's mass (represented by the letter m) and its velocity (v):[1]
The unit of momentum is the product of the units of mass and velocity. In SI units, if the mass is in kilograms and the velocity is in meters per second then the momentum is in kilogram meters per second (kg⋅m/s). In cgs units, if the mass is in grams and the velocity in centimeters per second, then the momentum is in gram centimeters per second (g⋅cm/s).
Being a vector, momentum has magnitude and direction. For example, a 1 kg model airplane, traveling due north at 1 m/s in straight and level flight, has a momentum of 1 kg⋅m/s due north measured with reference to the ground.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Momentum)
I couldn’t help but think about that directional force, the predictive power of it, how those forces ripple through our lives. Like a flight missing a quarantine by a day. How these little inputs have these massive outputs. The exact moment pressure drops enough for gravity to override it in a massive star. How the pigments change color, depending on how they are layered. How the former always affects the latter. Most of all, I thought of how opaque this system is, how little we can define the future reactions of all these miniscule inputs, amongst so many. I find it so exciting how little we know, in that excitement of discovery I found so much hope, in a time of so much fear.
That’s how this big mess of a painting came into being. A series of causality. Emotional highs and lows spurred on by change. Redefining how I perceived ignorance as a void to fear, into an excitement for discovery.
