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Idiot Wind
2016
Framed dimensions 79cms x 98cms
Acrylic with mixed media on Saunders Waterford 300lbs Heavyweight Paper in deep mount within a white painted timber frame.
I borrowed this title from a song by the inimitable Bob Dylan, there are a few recorded versions, probably the best-known being a track from one of his most influential albums Blood on the Tracks. In the song, Dylan uses the natural phenomenon of the wind as a metaphor for tangled and tortuous inter-personal experience, but also possibly, as an analogy for human existence or the human condition.
The painting is really a paradox, as it’s about nothing that we can see, as the wind is innately invisible, but leaves a memory in its wake, sometimes hardly discernible, but at other times, utterly devastating.
A mindless natural energy whose influence can be discerned and felt, but is often defined only by its aftereffects, which when intelligently harnessed can be positive and productive, but in its unfettered natural state, can cause indiscriminate destruction and indescribable chaos.
In the painting, the brain, the eye, and the hand conspire to convert a vivid phenomenological experience, a veritable maelstrom in fact, into an expression in a variety of fluid plastic materials that, if it were not for a semblance of an horizon and an indication of the sky, becomes almost completely abstract.
The title is essentially a hook for a complex visual metaphor for unbridled physical energy, expressed in a semi-liquid plastic material, constructed with constrained human energy and with considered orchestration. The objective being to create an image that for some, (but manifestly not for all) has dynamic pictorial coherence, rather than, as with the wind, the effect of a disorganised chaotic muddle.
It is the challenge to, and the inevitable burden of the non-figurative painter, that he or she must accept that their work is at best, only of interest to a small minority.
George Taylor
August 2023
