The Visual Field is a Container, 60 x 108 inches (triptych), acrylic & mixed media on panel, ©2016 Deidre Adams
I just finished another painting in my Metaphors & Mysteries series. These works will be part of an upcoming solo show at Point Gallery, Denver, opening Aug. 5. The series is based on concepts detailed in “Metaphors We Live By,” by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. (See other works in the series here and here.)
The title for this painting comes from Chapter 12, “How Is Our Conceptual System Grounded?” – page 58:
… We experience ourselves as entities, separate from the rest of the world – as containers with an inside and an outside. We also experience things external to us as entities – often also as containers with insides and outsides. … We experience many things, through sight and touch, as having distinct boundaries, and, when things have no distinct boundaries, we often project boundaries upon them – conceptualizing them as entities and often as containers (for example, forests, clearings, clouds, etc.)
As in the case of orientational metaphors, basic ontological metaphors are grounded by virtue of systematic correlates within our experience. As we saw, for example, the metaphor THE VISUAL FIELD IS A CONTAINER is founded in the correlation between what we see and a bounded physical space.
If you become aware of the painting as an object, you can think of it as being rather like a window, which is a boundary within your visual field. In most but not all paintings, there is an implied continuation of the visual field which you can’t see but may imagine.
I started this painting in late 2015, so I finished it in less than a year – pretty fast for me! Here are some in-progress views:
January 2016
May 2016
And some detail shots of the finished painting.
