Passing Through the Hues and Objects of the World

Chuck McCoy

Passing Through the Hues and Objects of the World

With an acknowledgement to mangling Walt Whitman’s first line in the poem Eidólons for the title of this exhibition, both the line and title evoke what it’s like for me to work as a visual artist while my eyes are playing tricks. One definition of eidolon is a specter or phantom. And one effect of having macular degeneration is something called phantom vision – seeing things that aren’t there. While I’m not at that point, I do think about the things I can see and those that I can’t and what I see when my eyes are open and the visions I have when my eyes are closed.

In some of these pieces the center action might or might not exist, but things are happening in the periphery, much like with macular degeneration. To add a wrinkle to this vision thing is the effect of migraines—aura distortions on the periphery of my vision. Those distortions have also appeared in previous pieces of mine as twisting rivers of color.

All this can sound dreary or depressing but I prefer to think of it as a way of examining what’s happening in the moment and trying to make sense of it visually. It’s much like a big living experiment—this passing through the world of hues and objects.

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The first stanza of Walt Whitman’s Eidólons

I met a seer,

Passing the hues and objects of the world,

The fields of art and learning, pleasure, sense,

To glean eidolons.