Chapters
by Daniel Stuelpnagel
Chapter Five
untitled # 133 (2001)
collection of Ty and Susan Boggs
(Dallas)The seascapes were what took me to the Galápagos Islands. The artist I visited was Sarah Darling, an English painter who had lived there for many years. She and her husband had previously run a touring ship, and the house outside of Puerto Ayora was a beautiful sculpture of volcanic rocks and salvaged marine lumber.
I rented a room for forty dollars a week, and enjoyed the kind of isolation and solitude I had only read about. From Sarah’s porch, where I set up my studio, I had a view of the Pacific ruled by the weather and the waves, surrounded by the diverse birds and iguanas for which the islands are well-known.
untitled # 134 (2001) private collection (Baltimore)These few seascapes, along with that one formative “landscape”, # 132, were the product of five weeks of gazing at the horizon in this unique, far away place.
For the first time, being out of the city environment that structured my existence in the northeast, I was painting a place, inhabiting that place in a new way.
I had gotten an introduction to this mode of being, the complete integration of my self and my artistic process with my surroundings, in San Francisco, and here was a place that embodied my life-long fascination with the ocean, almost completely devoid of human impact or construction, enabling me to experience what I envisioned in my dreams as the primordial existence of life on Earth, a sentient organic mass floating through space and time, perceiving only fluid movement, light and gravity, weather and water. This gave me a new beginning.
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