Whenever I walk in the woods, I wonder if I am going to encounter a some kind of animal, whether it is a herbivore like an elk or a predator like a lion or a black bear. I’m not generally very worried about the predators, because in all my years walking, I have never had a face to face meeting. Usually, I am just enjoying the appearance of things as if it was all an ornamental arrangement of forms.
In “Economical Use of Three Bears”, I fabricated a warm meadow scattered with perfect spruce trees of just the right size to be ornamental. The equally ornamental bears in the distance could play hide and seek in them for the tourists. I used only three bear types and four tree types to illustrate economy of design. In designing a complex image, it is not necessary for every object to be unique. A few examples repeated in a random way looks like a large number of unique things. In fact, it is quite difficult to spot and count the original examples if they number more than three. This idea of the copy vs the unique is central to painting. Every painted passage, even if I am trying to reproduce an existing passage, is unique. There is always some detectable variation when a thing is hand made – even if it is a copy – which make it unique, Yet, if I am painting an image of a real object, I am only making a kind of copy of its appearance. The configuration of paint is unique, but the appearance is a copy. In this painting, only the background squiggles are unique as things, although one could claim they are slightly inaccurate copies of squiggles.