Our habit is to watch ourselves from far away as if at a spectacle, and our habitat is the stage for our self- adoration. We are not so much in awe of nature as in awe of ourselves as we appreciate nature. We need to look through a human-made frame, a screen, any picture will do, as we show ourselves to each other at our best advantage.

These two paintings contain the usual elements of spectacle. Pretty leaves, dramatic skies, a flower, a nude. The problem is the nude is an ordinary middle-aged man, a hominid lying in nature. Gripping the sun with his knees in a mad juxtaposition of scale, or suspended vertiginously between the sky and the sky’s reflection, he looks out in a parody of the usual seductive gaze. Without an interleaving filter, a glossy objectification, we are brought closer than is perhaps comfortable at first.

Normally we go through life clothed and streamlined, our private selves invisible. Keeping up appearances is such a strain. Surely there is relief in forgetting, in relinquishing oneself into the soft leaves, the gentle light. Here there is a beauty to be found, which is less easily appreciated and less easily dismissed.

-Deborah Poynton