There is something inside the viewer that leaps in response to David Simpson’s paintings, a feeling that rises, draws a deep ah of breath, and becomes entranced, enmeshed in the orbit of each piece. These works have a kind of gravity – like small suns or worlds. They seamlessly pull the viewer to move, shift, to seek out the possibilities of light and color that transform across their canvases. This layered depth, this endless rippling change, gives a clue to explain why it is not only that jolt surprise of beauty that calls to us. These pieces feel alive.
The work included in First Light presents a survey of Simpson’s famous interference paintings from the past 30 years. Using a unique method of combining acrylic pigment with interference paints containing micro-particles of iridescent mica – Simpson painstakingly applies layer upon layer upon layer of translucent paint to the canvas. The painted surface becomes a three-dimensional space where light enters and has room to move – shimmering, reflecting, and refracting off these interference particles. It is this depth and chance interaction of light and particle that causes the signature color shifts that Simpson’s work is known for.
Each piece is a revelation – from the subtle to the radical. A piece like La Belle Bleu can shift from a shining, icy, saturated blue to a flat, pewter-heavy violet with a move from left to right. The intricately textured golden surface of Small Favor ignites into champagne pink and then deepens into frosted lilac. The deeply intense violet blue of Dark Violet Tondo glows as if with some kind of internal fire or bioluminescence, both arresting and calming.
Changes in viewpoint are not the only ways that these pieces can shift. The quality, color, and intensity of the light itself will cause changes in the paintings. Natural light or gallery light, a sunny day versus a cloudy one, the declination of the sun in summer or winter, these can cause a bright blue painting to become deep purple, or a red-shift in a copper one.
Which brings us back to that sense of these pieces being alive, unpredictable, and even mysterious. Like the show’s title, First Light, there is an analogy to these works in the beauty of a sunrise. Not only does it elicit that same kind of shock-of-joy-in-beauty, but no two are ever exactly the same. The light shifts. Clouds roll through. The sun ranges across the horizon. Trees grow. Mountains wear away. And the self seeing these sights is different from one day to the next.
Art is primarily a static medium: beauty (or terror) is caught up in paint or plaster, arrested in a singular moment to be experienced. What Simpson’s interference paintings do is to infuse the unknowable, transience, variation, changeability, to what at first appears fixed. Something of nature, a living element, shines through in these pieces. Never the same. Always beautiful.
— Michaela Kahn, Ph.D.
