This content was published: September 1, 2004. Phone numbers, email addresses, and other information may have changed.
Gabriel Liston – Formerly of the GPS
Rock Creek Helzer Gallery
September 2004
Ten years ago (at least at think it was ten years ago), I sat in the snow on a ridge; then by a creek; then in a cemetery, watching some surveying equipment as it tracked the path of 5-7 satellites in the sky above.
A little over ten years ago I walked through a mine field in the pines of Northern Nicaragua.
Twenty years ago, I dropped out of a 4-H Survival course; because I couldn’t stand to watch any more films about how I would go out into the woods and, through my own foolish self-confidence, wander down the wrong streambed, slowly succumbing to dehydration and hypothermia. And if I didn’t get caught by hypothermia, then the Bomb would certainly arrive while I was separated from my family, so proper last goodbyes would be out of the question.
For a few years, all that would get me out of the house was bird watching.
I was never particularly comfortable writing. It took too long, required my brain to go along too slowly, and demanded gross generalizations that seemed inconsistent with the constantly shifting sense I had of things. Writing required absolute statements, and once I wrote something down, it seemed inaccurate. I have learned to accept inaccuracy in writing.
With painting, there is no need to know exactly what I am doing in advance, no concrete answers and gross generalizations, only some questions and conditions to respond to. In general, I respond to the actions of a place. I am not nearly so concerned with knowing exactly where I am; so much as I’m interested in what my awareness of the place is and what visions it is informed by. When I paint and repaint a picture of a place or a child, I am re-showing myself what I may have seen. If it works, I can laugh.
A camera doesn’t tell me where I am any more than a satellite does. It didn’t walk here, I did. However, once I’m here, I don’t like to pretend there are no satellites floating above me or photographs have never shown me loss in some new and painful way. I don’t pretend them away, but neither do I use them to walk or to see. No, I take that back, every once in awhile, I do like to pretend I am walking according to the rules of time and gravity, or seeing the accumulation of moments without the memory of a shutter-click.
I don’t own a pair of binoculars anymore. I still have my bird book.
In Nicaragua, I began looking more carefully for the less than visible content of the landscape. I intend to return there someday and have another walk.
I still dislike scary movies.
I don’t have anything in particular to say about working for engineers and surveyors.
