Images and Thoughts

Even if a painting is supposed to be one particular orientation... freedom of observation is important to me. When I work on a painting I always switch it around at some point. Hopefully the viewer does so too. The object is what I made, not a viewing philosophy... and not just an image. The things that inspired it can be looked at it in virtually countless ways, the least I want to do is support four tops and four bottoms with the rectangle. The earth is a sphere, why always consider it from one orientation?

Here's what I do in my brain:

In all seriousness, imagining the world extending out from a landscape as a sphere is a nice way to remind oneself of a reality that is difficult to perceive yet when perceived sets us in an entirely different context. That of the things on an object hurtling around:

All stillness is illusory.

So, again... (shots from Mt. Rainier National Park)

We are spinning around. I don't think it's a gimmick, as much as it seems to frustrate people... why not at least play with the language? Like 'sunrises' and 'sunsets'. We don't say the ground walks beneath us, but we still refer to the sun as moving around us with our language. It reminds me of something I heard recently: the idea that in medieval times it was linguistically impossible to be an atheist because of the structure and implications of language. But over any long period of time, language is quite flexible (if not downright chaotic). Thankfully.