Mapping {Eric Angeloch}

"No. 4",  Angeloch, oil, 30"x30"

I know you know what happened today. That’s right, I could not find where I pulled that mysterious shovel head out of the ground yesterday. It’s going on ten years that I have walked those 10 or 12 acres of woods, the shovel head was right in one of my usual paths. As surprised as I was yesterday to trip over something I walked by hundreds of times I am not so surprised that I couldn’t find the evidence today.

Mysteries are like that. Most of our lives are mysteries much as we try to fake ourselves into believing we are in charge and control. A flash flood destroying a Village has a certain way of ripping that consciousness to shreds. Art, the making and the viewing of it, has the same power though usually more gently wielded.

"No.10", Angeloch, oil, 30"x30"

These are new Eric Angeloch paintings. Eric paints his feelings. He uses his memories and impressions of cloud formations and storms to express his feeling state on canvas. I have shown Eric’s work for 10 years now. Over the years one person after another has looked at an Eric painting and named a specific place that is the painting. Yet Eric makes up his landscapes, it is not a specific place and Eric’s landscapes often defy our physical landscape by their characteristics.

Still I would say that Eric paints the truth. Things often seem to be pretty much as we feel them to be, whether great or good enough or lousy. Change how we feel and we have essentially changed how we are. Sounds simple enough. And it is and isn’t. Like a good painting somewhere embedded in the process of change and creativity is mystery. A painter like Eric works and stands there and looks and works and thinks and stands there some more, open and ready for something unexpected and enlivening to happen on the canvas. It’s a sweaty process and it doesn’t always work. I think of Eric’s paintings as compelling records of self change, maps that he offers us, “Here, here is how I made it through that dark passage, so may you.”

"No. 4", Angeloch, oil, 30"x30"