UNCHARTED TERRITORY
The model in Dutch Light appears again in In the Mirror No. 2, a 48-inch-wide work showing a female figure looking directly at the viewer from a mirror held out in front of her face. The figure is relatively small in the work, dwarfed by two blank walls that divide the painting. In Barometer, a red-headed figure stands next to a door, and immediately to her right is an empty wall, filled partly by the subject in the title. Negative space plays a huge part of both paintings, and it’s not by accident.
“I think immediately of Mondrian or Vermeer—they are great influences on me. I love composing a work with the negative space. Sometimes I compose them into the images right away, and other times I’ll revisit them by coming back to them day after day,” Downey says, adding that he typically begins each painting with a photo session. “I’ll have an idea for light and color, so I’ll choose my model and locations and get wardrobe together. It feels like a mini film set even though it’s just me and the model. Occasionally my wife will work as a photography assistant. I’ll take 1,000 photos in a day and then chisel them down to what I want. Then I can start playing more with the light, the color, those negative spaces. I want it all to be figured out before I even start painting.”
Incoming Sun, which also has interesting areas of negative space, is another fascinating study of light and line. In it, a figure’s legs are illuminated by sunlight coming in through a window at an extreme angle. At her feet are an arrangement of lines in the wood flooring, in the baseboards and in what appears to be a vent system mounted near the floor. “The geometry of that one was fun to put together. It’s very pleasing to the eye,” he says.
The work also reinforces his central themes: reflective isolation. He immediately thinks about Andrew Wyeth’s Helga series, in which Wyeth painted a neighbor secretly for 15 years. “I like to think of those works as more contemplative, but also very haunting. Haunting because we’ve forgot how to be all alone. This is also why mirrors are so interesting to me. Mirrors are windows on another world that is happening in tandem with ours. We are simply the ghostly image passing through it.”