ABOUT RUSSELL SUNABE

I'm an artist living and working in Hawai‘i. My work is influenced by the volcanic landscape and the Native Hawaiian and Hawaiian-Creole cultures of Hawai‘i. It provides the cultural frame I look out of into the larger issues of life and our times.

When I look at a painting, I'm looking for a painting experience. I want to see it and feel it on different levels, to make me, as a friend said, “want to run home and paint.”

The images or narrative doesn't really matter, but it should be there to draw you to the picture, to make you want to look. For some, it's enough at that level. Then one enters into the sensuousness of paint, the way it's handled, colors, etc.

As one responds that way, then the formal qualities become important; the painting can operate on an abstract level. Relationships become important. Marks, color, shapes, and so on as it relates to abstraction and again, paramount is the sensuousness of paint.

Space, or the illusion of it as 3D or 2D in many ways, become irrelevant because it all matters as a totality of experience, a totality of visual experience. One comes and goes in and out of different spatial readings as one feels the unity of the total effect.

The journey of that reading, rather than a limited and limiting interpretation is the painting experience I look for. The painting reveals it's making, it's craft. I like the sense that a painting is built, one can see these layers, that there is a physical sensation to the relationship between them, a simplicity, and a complexity.

We are as Philip Guston said, “image ridden.” It is there, whether submerged or on the surface forming relationships with each other, with the paint and with the accumulation of images we have inside each of us, ready to form narratives, to be interpreted, to be understood. Many times, we interpret differently even as we look at the same thing, for the images and the readings they make are metaphorical and open-ended.

Approaching painting in this manner is to keep the interpretive experience always fresh, as if it is slightly different every time.

The same can be true with the structure of a painting, that can be formed and reformed as we read across the surface and the depth of the painting with our intellect, for it too is seen as a series of relationships forming narratives of an aesthetic kind. And this too can be reread and experienced on different levels and thus remains open-ended, an allegorical construct.