MOUNTAINS, SHOES AND THE LAUREL & HARDY RULE cont'd.
In his own pursuit of progressive expression Tolkien realized if he couched fantastic mythology in a richly described world that was otherwise very like ours, strange but not too strange, the effect could be deeply compelling. As a fellow romantic I could certainly do worse than follow this example in a visual sense, throwing unusual shapes and color combinations into the terrestrial mix. Passages occur that would rather be yarn bundles or broken bits of crockery but, too bad, they're in a landscape so instead they're playing the role of clouds and islands...or in this show, mountains and shoes.
Though certainly not rubbish, I've realized that for me abstraction is more of a means than an end, an exotic and unpredictable realm that can galvanize the imagination and save a genre like landscape from predictability. And when the right balance is struck in these pieces between the strange and the not too strange, I am grateful for the help and wonder if the stuff at school was really that bad.
