PALIMPSEST: The Falls over the Willamette
The Falls Over The Willamette series continues linearly from my landscape series. It is painted in my Palimpsest style: the term “Palimpsest” describes ancient manuscripts in which the original text has been effaced, scraped or altered to allow for rewriting yet still bears traces of the original.
Over a fully realized painting, I add layers of paint to produce an effect akin to the processes of memory and forgetting. I am interested in the way images of our personal and collective memories often push through layers of time and new experiences into our thoughts. The use of paint over paintings, often of places in Oregon, or based on ideas of Oregon history, recapitulates the way we tend to remember, where only some elements of the past arise clearly, while others are obscured by the passage of time or the hand of man.