8. Eruption The defining event of the ancient world, and the reason we can look directly into the painted life of Pompeii, was the catastrophic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE. Destruction paradoxically enabled preservation. Living today in a permanent state of climate emergency, this is not so much a form of solace as a question about speculative futures. How will what we are making now endure in times ahead? Which questions will our current traces conjure in the minds of future civilizations? What pleasures are we unwittingly storing up for those curious and sympathetic humans, robots, or aliens who dig up the pieces, and painstakingly identify our loves and hates as they suture them back together? Will they even want to? The fragment is related to eruptions of all kinds. There is the eruption of geological action, and there is eruption as psychological release, the valve diametrically tied to repression. When it comes to painting, there are eruptions of gestures, colors, thoughts, and words, held down by the artist until they pour out onto a surface. Eruptions don’t always look like themselves, or look like abstraction, expressionism, or impasto projectiles. The very drive to paint may come gushing in at first, and then process takes over, resulting in something that could go in many directions, be it carefully rendered, stylized, or stroked slowly, over and over. Eruptions can be hormonal or anxious, nostalgic or dissociated. They can be full-bodied or mind-only. Eruption, like Eternity and Reflection, is one of the elemental properties and the subtext of painting. Mirroring the trembling Earth, the personal drive gains traction and finds a way to pierce the cold hard shell of doubt, oppression, or shame. Eruption is a disorienting, game-changing whole, out of which the resulting artwork is only ever a small, incomplete fragment, surviving against the odds. —AK
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