Country Air

In the Beach Boys' song Country Air, the refrain “Get a breath of that country air, breathe the beauty of it everywhere” repeats three times. By repetition, the sense of that place could be conjured: its freshness, its expanse of space, its dappled light. Pulsating back and forth, a vaporous incantation becomes a site within reach. More distant as the song continues, it is entangled with effervescent misremembering, making way for the charm and limitations of personal fantasy. These paintings are an excursion–highlights from a journey of an itinerant dreamer. Each work in the series is a marker of an undisclosed and obscure location, connected by recurrent color, signals, fluid and rigid forms. Created with layers of acrylic watercolor and finished with oil, each piece is compressed and saturated with divergent thematic propositions. Much like the discursive trajectory of a song, the combination of deliberate shapes and colors vibrate alongside chance encounters accumulating in the painting’s itinerary. The traveler is the subject of the series. Mapping and tracing form a trail that bonds the works together. The traveler contends with the paradox of an interior voyage and a conflicting connection with the real world. Wandering along, this pilgrim sings the refrain of Country Air to supplicate the random forces and to document a journey that is simultaneously near-at-hand and ungraspable. The paintings offer a footnote to the great and familiar idea of longing for an elsewhere, judged by its power to connect, illuminate, and make new and fruitful places for reflection. —Kathryn Kerr