David Nelson
If you're an omnipotent being who also allows free will, your day is filled with things you cause and things you allow. Some events you make happen with direct action, and some you let happen, permitting individuals to choose and act. And still other happenings occur on their own due to systems you set up previously, like biology, chemistry, physics, and the powerful magnetism of a Boston creme donut. Throughout history, conceptions of God's character have reflected this balance as well: law and love, justice and mercy, holiness and forgiveness, eternity and time, transcendence and imminence.
And whether we believe in the idea of God or not, for us beings with free will our day is filled with pretty much the same stuff. Relationships, work, raising children, all are a balance of exertion and occurrence; what we make happen and what happens to us. We set up systems too, like government, family, credit cards - and happenings spill from them. We're immersed in this balance of opposites; reason and instinct, mind and heart, body and spirit, intellect and emotion, work and fun, effort and luck.
And for those of us free-willed beings who make art, the similarities between our day and God's calendar page are even more similar. David Nelson's series of paintings "God's Appointment Book" explores the balanced opposites that make up all of life and art. Red, yellow and blue paint are spattered on the canvas, but must fall through a random gridwork that determines which parts of the canvas get spattered. The resulting image depends on the balances of intention and accident, systems and deviation, pattern and randomness, idea and medium, mechanical grid and organic spatter, theme and improvisation, creator and creating, unseen influence and visible result, and finally art and viewer, especially the viewer, whose eye mixes the colors and whose mind forms a response independent of the creator yet undeniably linked by the created work.
These images aim to provide an open door for the artist and viewer to contemplate the dynamic paradoxes that define our reality, and allow a peek into what the pages of God's appointment book might look like.
David Nelson received his Bachelor of Arts degree in Fine Art from the University of Maine at Orono. He currently lives in New Hampshire where he works as a free lance Graphic Designer. Some of his projects have included; the Yankee Magazine, Dartmouth Alumni Magazine, Yankee's travel Guide to New England, and UNH Magazine. |
