Finding Light (Triptych)

Finding Light is O'Guinn at his most physical and his most expansive. Across three panels stretching fourteen feet, curtains of white and bone acrylic pour down the canvas in long vertical runs, pooling and thinning as gravity takes them. Beneath and through that veil a darker world persists: charcoal tangles of graphite and aerosol, olive greens, and passages of warm ochre that surface briefly before the drips close over them again.

The three panels work as a single continuous field. The first concentrates the falling paint into a dense wall, while the second and third open the rhythm outward, with heavy passages alternating against thinner, more translucent stretches. Read together, the eye travels the painting laterally, the way it would travel a treeline, and the drips build into something closer to weather than to marks on a surface.

O'Guinn moved from photography to painting over the past decade, and he works from music and memory rather than observation. The imagery underneath is not quite legible and is not meant to be. Branches, undergrowth, rain and the low light of a Pacific Northwest forest are implied rather than depicted, filtered through the same haze that softens a memory. The title describes the process as much as the subject: the light in the painting has to be found through the layers, not applied on top of them.

At this scale the work becomes environmental. Standing close, the drips exceed peripheral vision; from across a room, the composition resolves into structure, dark masses braced against falling white. O'Guinn describes what he is after as glimpses, raw moments that let one person recognize another's experience, and across three panels the painting earns that word.
Finding Light is offered as a complete triptych. The work may also be acquired individually by panel or as a diptych; please contact the gallery for details.