UNIFIED FIELD
I AM NO LONGER DEPICTING THE WORLD; I AM STIRRING UP COSMIC STARDUST AND SEEING WHAT MIGHT EMERGE.
Watch the full length video below
“Listening only to my instincts, I discovered superb things.”
— CLAUDE MONET
A SELECTION OF UNIFIED FIELD
WAVE
EVERYTHING MOVES
CASCADE
HOMMAGE TO M.VAHE
FRAGILE TIME
WISTERIA
RAKING
NIGHT CHANDELIER
CHANDELIER AQUA
ETERNAL THINGS
HAZE
THE EVOLUTION OF UNIFIED FIELD
Music in both videos by Nick Hetko
Unified Field is a series of paintings based on an unexpected personal experience that I could neither explain nor forget - an experience that changed my understanding of the world and our place in it.
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How we know the world is how we experience it through our senses. If our senses are distorted by whatever means, that also becomes a part of our reality.
Once I had this experience of the world floating in dust motes of colorful confetti, I searched for an explanation. Buddhist teaching revolves around a point of view reached in the world of acintya, or “no-thought,” where the unity of all opposites becomes a vivid experience. This experience is very difficult to describe in three-dimensional consciousness. I have friends who have reached this state through prolonged meditation. They have never quite been able to explain it to me, but all report this feeling of unity with the world, a sense of being a tiny particle in the scheme of things and having a tremendous sense of well-being or universal love.
A similar thing exists in the world of relativistic physics where force and matter are unified.
This tells me that I had experienced something that does, in fact, exist in our universe, but is rarely experienced on this plane.
Since then, I searched for a way to convey this experience in paint.
STUDIO NOTES
A few years ago my studio roof started leaking pretty severely. My assistant ran to the hardware store and bought several kiddy pools. The roof has been replaced, but the pools became an essential studio tool when I started pouring paint on my canvases.
I spent five months as an artist-in-residence at Giverny and then about ten years studying Monet's time at Giverny. Now that is woven into everything that I do.
Monet painted what he saw, and when his sight was altered by cataracts, he painted that. The exaggerated reds and slight overtones of brown were part of his altered vision.
Water is a constant inspiration.
The Battenkill River runs through my town and I frequently watch the light play on the surface of the water.
Not all of these paintings are created with abandon. Several are based on my photographs of sequined fabric and in those every mark corresponds to one in the photo. It never works to lay it down once, especially when I am working on a dark field. I had to repaint this painting three times to get the color saturation I was looking for.
"Whistler's Rocket" was inspired by this painting of fireworks by Whistler.
Gravity is my assistant. The paintings are either on the wall, the floor or my "painting table", depending on whether or not I want the paint to drip.
Klimt, like Raffael, circled his colors. Many people have commented that my new work reminds them of Klimt and I think it is becasue of this.
Detail of painting by Joseph Roffael. I noticed that like Klimt, Raffael circled his area of color. It makes the color more distinct from a distance.
Ellsworth Kelly visited Giverny after the war and before the Monet gardens were restored. This painting came from that experience. My guess is that he was there in late July when the garden is dominated by this green.
Joan Mitchell lived in Vetheuil, above the house once occupied by Monet. There are many echos of Monet in her work.
Cy Twombly did a stunning series of painting based on Monet's pond. These painting are largely painted with Prussian green. Mid-summer the pond turns to black and this green. I love his choice of a shaped canvas that is reminiscent of the architectural detail of a 19th century Parisian apartment. It is as though he painted it for Durand Ruel.
This is a shaped painting I did from Giverny in the 1990s and it has almost exactly the same palette at the Cy Twombly.