Aha
For myself, mapping abstractions in affine has become its own journey. I was attracted to this geometry because of the sound of the word said aloud in my pronunciation of it (“uh-feen”) and because I could not find a suitable visual translation of it that could help me understand its linear logic. I liked that this word implied a geometric diagram for a figure, and this reminded me of the practice of Phillip Otto Runge, a Romantic German painter whom I greatly admire. The generative structure and movements of this mathematical abstraction maps spaces beyond traditional perspectives in that it does originate from a ground and its structure need not bear on its origin (by definition, affine geometry loses its origin in its progression of transformations). Visualizing these abstractions in painting allows me to suppose hypothetical ways of experiencing the world and imagine new possible trajectories for thought. Exploring them expands my intuitions of spatial and gestural relations.
As for the gesture, the allure of its mark in a painting is similar to the feeling of suddenly being hit with a new idea. Both are products of an immediate, intuitive act that cannot have occurred in isolation, and which cannot be reduced to its parts. Next time I am confronted with another’s painting, I will have this in mind: A painting is composed by countless numbers of gestures, acts that not only structure thoughts, but embody them as well. A painting emerges from the actions of a person and these actions express a continuity of life and a residual of networked relationships between painter, viewer, light, and color.