Phenomenology (SOLD)

36″ x 36″ x 1.5″ acrylic paint on canvas.

I’ve been reading a beautiful book by anthropologist Michael Jackson (not the musician) about the phenomenology of storytelling in times of violent transformation. Storytelling offers the possibility of capturing the experience of living and moving through time.

Each person perceives so many threads in each moment that it can feel impossible or even pointless to pull them apart to ‘make sense of them.’ Jackson writes, “[T]he range of experiences that are socially acknowledged and named is always much narrower than the range of experiences that people actually have.”

Sometimes, what we feel and sense loses meaning as soon as the threads are untangled and made legible in the formulaic ways expected for public consumption. According to Jackson, this is where storytelling can be creatively agentive, much like art.

This is what I like about art and anything that challenges how we process ideas and time. As a consumer of art and ideas, I love that sense when something is almost intelligible but when you know you will lose the meaning if you try too hard to untangle the threads. So you just sit with it, in it.