Seeing What's Hidden.
When I first met Danny it appeared to me, as it does to so many other people, as if he had turned his back on the world. "Don't take it personally, but I have no choice. I can only face one way at a time" he once said. What I didn't realize, and am still coming to understand, is that he really is intentionally facing away, to position himself toward the other side, directly at the hidden.
He considers these images as a record of this shift in attention; images pulled from the free-fall of his life as he deliberately and with self-sacrifice changed his living aspect. "You can't fake this. I'm lucky I didn't know what depth really was when I took the leap. But it didn't matter – I knew I was going regardless. I'm just glad I took such pretty notes," he laughed.
I'm only just touching on the many aspects of Danny and his work. It's a slow process, because I've had to learn to see things in a new way, from many points of view. Take, for example, one of his 2' x 2' pieces. This is #13 in the series, born on 3/1/4. Like all these paintings it contains numerous points of reference.
Which means to see it, you have to see it in regions. The first is the whole piece, the apparent object in relation to the background, color and size and motion and mood all coming from this level. The object itself, rich with pattern and line and color and form, is composed of many other objects, each representative of a distinct domain.
Paintings rest within paintings, regions nest inside regions. They all have an identity, a certain oneness that makes it definable and enjoyable in its own right, and at the same time are intimately integrated with other distinctively whole bodies and forms.
Each of these little regions is composed of still smaller regions, little entities living in the bigger entity within the still bigger entity. They are as dunes within a desert, leaves upon a tree, cells within a beast.
Remarkably, when you've seen as many of these regions as possible, down to the smallest perceivable world, there is still more. For hidden in this scant matter are other dimensions revealed by the paintings relationship with light.
Pour light in from the side and one dimension of color is revealed. Cut it hard against the source and another emerges, like golden mounds turning to snowcapped hills, winter into summer. Sparks emerge and scatter just beneath color and shape, a fire of light trapped in motion. Shadows show where no shadow exists, deep pockets where all is actually flat, revealed by the motion of light, like landscapes of endless perturbation beheld under shifting skies.
Driving the piece against the light in this manner inevitably brings one directly in relation to the source, and as the image intensifies and brilliance bursts forth, the ultimate flash of gut-grabbing richness is overwhelmed by the source itself, the center of the light, like staring directly at the sun.
And like the qualities of light that stir our soul at the rise and setting of the sun, the number and intensity of the light sources used to bring the piece to life further creates realms of variation. Brighten light brings boldness, dimmed brings the mysterious, multiple lights reveal roundness, and fluctuations of intensity find motion in the entire work.
How many aspects are there in a piece? I've yet to run out. Perhaps there is a finite number of angles and sources and moods and elements and regions and painted works themselves, but in my time I have seen nothing but individual works of infinitely variable art.
Worlds>