third verse, different from the first

I started my blog, Terrain, back in January of 2012. At that time I was making photographic abstractions and was fascinated by the correspondences that I saw between the work that I and other abstract photographers were doing and the work of abstract painters. The idea of the blog was to place photographs and paintings side by side in order to explore these common threads.

Ever since I began to paint in 2014, my work has taken a markedly different direction. I now consider myself a realist painter, and my subject matter is power: how power moves from the inside out, from the top on down, from West to East, from capitals to countrysides, from the powerful, through their agents, to the powerless below. But I’m still fascinated by correspondences. My paintings, for instance, have so far been based on news photographs, maintaining their connection to the real of world events. But they are also based on the reporting that I see, the reading that I do, and the writing that I create. More and more I’ve come to think of my art practice as multi-faceted, with the images occupying only the most prominent position in a nexus of seeing, reading, writing, and painting.

This interpenetration of news, critical theory, photographic images, essay writing, and most of all, painting, is what I'll be exploring in the future here on Terrain. Deal?

John Rosewall, Bargain, 2017