Daniel Champion Paintings at Good Mother Gallery (as I remember, from my notebook in Vermont, as Grant and Danielle prepare dinner and Lucas drinks wine.)

A few months ago--it was spring when vitality animated a green aura of happiness, and vice versa--Daniel and I sat on a bench, some awkward distance from one another, he curtailing anecdotes about artistic practice with tales from the labor line, frame building, his favorite matcha. 

I write from memory; and succumbing to the swirling fantasma of memory's aids, sparks, open my palm of stars and look back at the votive images I captured with Daniel, as he walked me through the gallery of renderings, each hearth-like in cast and shadow (48" x 60"), each an ironic well of Americana and its imaginative force.

Daniel explained--the paintings were created quickly; each completed in a single session--except one, a young woman's affectionate wrangle gathering a goat, its constitutes of joy and otherwise meaningless expansion of cells, entraining either her flesh to its, or its to her, as if before sleep, matching external rhythm; and goat, pensive, disguised, even playlessly disgusted, transformed into an object of the character's possession; aware, dryly, of becoming a possession of our--viewers'--meaningless joy. 

Kierkegaard finds Irony--language emptied of meaning and replacing the subject with itself--qualifies subjectivity through self-consciousness. A sphere who transfers energy to permutations of self; or, for Kierkegaard, is redeemingly replaced with fullness.

We stood in front of a painting, two large figures seated in a topless automobile; which, by the characteristic whimsy of Daniel's image making, appear to be seated on top of the seats. The man's arm rests on the woman's, and defines her legs. Each of their expressions impenetrable, omniscient. The woman has more depth than the dimensionless man, who is so flat he could fall to the infinite paper sky. 

The figures reminded me of the Kennedys--and, when asked, Daniel responded, how an iconic death becomes vaguely familiar--quickly, he added--and heal-turned to how each brush stroke, gesture, had become a faint, brief memory.