Terminal Destination
I was satisfied with Terminal Destination when I finished it. As always, I want to judge my work from two perspectives, the execution (mark making, composition) and how it works conceptually/historically.
Execution:
Composition: This picture works for me. The plane is a typical airliner glamor shot. The suburb below is twisted. There is no real horizon line. There is a subtle compression as we reach the top of the page, but its not a ‘real’ perspective.
Mark Making: I think this picture reflects a more mature use of colored pencils for me. I think I am starting to layer pencil some here. Its a damnable medium.
I felt that my not creating realistic or more beliveable yards for the houses was not good. I did a couple more very similar compositions where I did add streets and delineated yards, but I think this picture works better.
Initial Intent (The middle of a narrative):
This is part of a larger series. When I was a wee lad, I would watch films on TMC (Turner Movie Classic). When I got access to this channel, it was a revelation to me. I got into the studio films of the 1930s and 40s. Every day, TMC would air two films and repeat them over and over until the next day. As they aired. You couldn’t pause or rewind them. They started when they started. Often I had the experience of joining the film halfway through. I found that if I also didn’t catch the end, those fragments stayed with me. They required reconstruction. I spent a lot of time imagining who the characters were and what they ended up doing.
That’s the structure behind this series of works. Terminal Destination, an ending without a beginning, where the viewer is left to supply the rest. The aim was to capture the feeling of the old Hollywood “The End” title cards from 1930s and ’40s films, and place that language against an image that suggests a larger narrative. The airplane crossing over a dense suburban landscape becomes a kind of fragment. It feels like the closing shot of a story you haven’t fully seen. Who was on the plane? Where were they going? What just happened?
Terminal Destination… Man… that is a cheesy title.
I have created several pictures with ‘The End’ as a focal point. I wasn’t aware of Ruschas work until just recently. I don’t have very much to say about Ruscha as an artist, I don’t think that my work has anything to do with what Ruscha did. That said… he did do this body of work in the 90s.
I added a statement from Ruscha above. He talks about ‘the finality’, ‘the movie is rolling to a stop’. I think of what I did with the several ‘The End’ pictures is approach it from the opposite perspective. You see ‘The End’ and you are sitting there trying to figure out what happened before, so really its the start, not the end.
