Monday, February 24, 2014

Flying Homeward

OK, this is the final image for this painting. Minor final details were incomplete at the last posting, and it has a real title - "Flying Homeward" It is an essay in dichotomy. Similar but different perspectives on home, navigation, and technology in my art. Home. I have been living in Portland Oregon for twenty years now but still feel a powerful connection to the city of Los Angeles, its neighborhoods and lifestyle. Navigation. In this image there is an arial view of downtown Portland where Burnside Street crosses the Willamette River as a rendered birds eye view. Overlaid on top of this image of an area in Los Angeles where the 110 freeway passes through the Highland Park neighborhood. The arial view is representational of the iconic dream of flying and embodies that subconscious yearning for freedom and migration and a place to call home. Like the migration of geese. The map book has long been one of my most important navigational tools for learning new places. Portland has been rendered from digital images captured from Google Earth aerial photos, whereas the map overlay is a graphic rendering of the streets and other cartographic information from the Thomas Guide map book