August 2013
La Petite Mort Gallery presents
THE MINOR’S BACKSTORY OF STONES
PAUL SHARP/ NEW PAINTINGS
August 1 – 31, 2013
Vernissage Thursday August 1 / 7-10pm
The Minor’s Backstory of Stones
These paintings evolved from issues inspired by my walk amongst the ruins in Japan, considering dollar store objects and precious heirlooms lying broken in the rubble, I noticed I had similar things cluttering my life, and I began to wonder how my foot prints would look distorted by the waves and how my history would appear exposed for everyone to see. When I began working on the images my focus was cataloguing emotional instances from my past, painting a record of the experiences that shaped me, and examining my watershed moments with the aim of decreasing their power to bog me down. Pondering the tsunami helped me to paint the events of my life as introspective parables that dwell on the Sunday school message, let he who is without sin cast the first stone.
Aging is intensifying my need to chronicle the past; sorting my photographs and working on these paintings are recent examples of this tendency. Before arranging my photos I looked, for inspiration, at albums from my childhood; the events and feelings of those times were foreign, like an unfamiliar language. The reality of the pictures threatened to erode the emotions I preserved and shaped into my own coming of age story. Anxiety that the snapshots full of posed smiles, the inconsequential billboards that followed the roads I traveled, will remain the only relics of my path, encouraged me to create these paintings. No pictures were taken to capture the days when I first fell in love or of my turbulent spirit after she turned me down. No albums can capture how I felt when my mistakes prompted a police presence, or record my dreadful mood after discovering how differently my friends saw the world, but paintings can. The children in the paintings act as externalised memory, to me more authentic than a photograph, they are vessels to protect my recollections from the storms of time, and they highlighting the gap that has formed between me and the version of myself that sinks, disappearing ever farther from the surface.
After visiting the tsunami devastated homes in Japan my need for these paintings to merely catalogue my past changed. The experience made me consider blame and work to capture those reflections in my art. The absence of human fault behind the natural disaster forced me see circumstances differently than with other tragedies when blame is assigned as cause of a situation like environmental catastrophe or war. Pondering responsibility helped me to approach these canvasses while reflecting upon my record of blaming others for the state of the world. The tsunami also exposed peoples’ secrets in the street; while the experience was heartbreaking I realized that I needed to expose my experiences in my paintings by looking critically at my past in light of my new awareness of blame and responsibility. As the issues around us get more complex we feel hopeless to induce change, even though most problems start with personal experiences that, over time, multiply and manifest on an immense scale. Instead of examining the ripples we cause, we seek faults in others that might explain the waves battering our shores, positioning ourselves as islands of virtue we throw stones at everyone swimming by, blaming them for the currents that flood our shores. Dredging my memory for the subjects of these paintings, I found a history rich with greed, envy and desire that contribute, on a personal scale, to big problems such as pollution, conflict and marginalization now challenging society. One painting reflects on my yearning for material things, epitomized by innocent recollections of disappointment instigated by never having anything to play with despite my mountain of toys. Another canvas depicts how liberating and transformative the freedom from home was for me, yet is also hints at how I made myself comfortable in places I didn’t belong, infringing on communities around me. The inhabitants of my canvasses embody my experiences, in different settings and with strangers’ faces, anonymously; they are not intended as self portraits, instead I have fashioned my history into parables. While I don’t have the power to change the world these works are reflections on the personal roots of larger dilemmas facing us today, realized through reflection on tragedy. These paintings have made me more introspective; instead of casting stones I hope to use them in building constructive paths forward.