January 10, 2005
Pattern Recognition
Have you ever had a sense of deja vu while viewing artistic endeavors? Before I read the caption for the above painting, I had a fairly certain notion that I'd been to that offramp on multiple occasions. And sure enough, Exit 29 off of upstate New York's I-87 was indeed familiar to me from my numerous trips to races in New York's Lake Placid region or races in the Burlington, VT/Stowe, VT neck of the woods. I've been a fan of Jim Kunstler after reading his book The Geography of Nowhere and lately I've been spending time reading the rich, yet somewhat grim, musings on his site concerning sprawl, congestion, and the ramifications of our country's addiction to cheap petroleum. It's interesting to see how the detritus of sprawl, industry, and transportation infiltrate Kunstler's paintings of what I believe to be scenes in the vicinity of his upstate New York home. It also reminds me of R. Crumb's comments, within the excellent documentary Crumb, about how we've been totally de-sensitized to the omnipresence of overhead power/phone lines and traffic signs. Crumb was talking about having a friend drive him to your typical "strip", chock full of fast food restaurants and gas stations, so he could sketch the electrical and communication cables. Crumb needed to have realistic urban/suburban scenery for his comics and he was shocked that he couldn't draw them from memory even though he knew he'd seen them ad nauseum.
