2001

The original clip-art works that I referred to for quantum field of cattle are by many different graphic artists. I wanted to take their digitized images  and place them in a kind of stasis – a ‘half way house’ so to speak, between virtual space and real space. I was careful to show that the legs of the large brown beast at the top had been and were still pixelated – no doubt at all that these beasts had been computer generated. I then tried to create a real depth of space, by painting the cattle as if they were fading into a distant sky, and indeed if you were to stare at the painting you would get a sense of the real space in which both they and you exist.

So what was this work actually about, and what if any contribution does it make towards our comprehending of things in 2020? The first thing to note is that these are not bits of stone or bricks – they are images of cattle – living things, which relates us to them immediately in a way that bricks don’t. They each seem to have some sort of anthropomorphic personality – at least the ones in the foreground do, which means that we have an emotional bond with them as well as a life bond. And it is those which are closest to us that seem to be the thing, whilst the others receding into the distance seem to lose their individual personas by degree.

The personalities which inhabit the foreground seem to be encouraging us to enter their space – their quantum field. And as we stare without focusing into the painting, we are convinced that its depth of field is real – just as real as the height and the width of the painting. We realize that if the ‘depth’ of space can only be in our differentiating between the cattle, then the ‘width’ and ‘height’ of space must also be differential.  The difference between the cattle is not spatial, rather it is the space of the field that is differential.  The painting and all that surrounds it is an illusion, a trick of the mind. Reality is not actually real.