Unresolved Feelings about Painting. Part one. “Wheat Pasting”
I’ve been thinking a lot about painting over the past couple of years. Most of my work for some time now has been in photography but for many years I worked primarily in painting. For me much of that work remains to me, unfinished. Looking back, I was reminded that my connection to the camera was much more about my connection to painting. Me building imagery in photography that was rooted in my perspective on painting. At first, perhaps a bit unconsciously the works are based on traditions in painting
In these new photographic images gathered from my walking commute I recently discovered an assemblage that held for me the aspects of how I might approach the canvas today. In Wheat Pasting themes of mental illness and inner turbulence echo throughout the work, not as narratives of despair but as landscapes of resilience. The chaos within—the jagged edges, the fragmented forms—coexists with a tender yet troubling beauty that emerges when these pieces are held together. My process mirrors this: a balance of control and surrender, where unexpected textures and layers reveal meaning I couldn’t have foreseen.
My work is a conversation between the seen and the unseen, the tangible and the ephemeral. As a mixed media photographer, I am drawn to the spaces where light collides with texture, where the sharp clarity of a photograph dissolves into the tactile ambiguity of other materials. Through layering, distortion, and intervention, I seek to unearth the complex relationships between memory, identity, and the passage of time.
Ultimately, in this project there is a meditation on dualities. It speaks to the human need to find coherence amidst the disorder, to uncover beauty within ruin, and to hold color shape and texture as essential parts of the same whole. I invite my audience to step closer, to see beyond the surface, and to find themselves within the layers.
Steven Duede, January 2025