(be)longing

I mentioned in my last post my photographs and paintings rarely have figures. It's something people have commented on, especially when I created my "house of cards" series. This absence echoes through much of my life. I'm thinking about it now. I use other elements as stand ins: houses, buildings, posts, poles. Are they enough? They are silent, melancholic. Often alone. Rooted to the spot. In terror? Or belonging? Interacting at distance. Gravitation fields. Knots of intense being, radiating outwards, pushing/pulling. In stasis. Life - narrative - as an abstract geometry. Orbits, cycles, epicycles. Lines of force

I found this quote by diebenkorn, whose work I admire.

"As soon as I started using the figure my whole idea of painting changed. Maybe not in the structural sense, but these figures distorted my sense of interior or environment, or the painting itself - in a way that I welcomed. Because you don't have this in abstract painting... in abstract painting one can't deal with... an object or a person, a concentration of psychology which a person is as opposed to where the figure isn't in a painting... And that is one thing that is always missing for me in an abstract painting. I don't have this kind of dialoque between elements that can be ... wildly different and can be at war, or in extreme conflict"