Cosmic Clock

Love the size for this one!

Told in rich and enigmatic passages of ever-overlapping oil, David Downs’ Cosmic Clock is an aptly named galactic exploration. The many iterations of cosmic beauty—both imagined and seen through a telescope—are fertile but treacherous grounds for artistic expression. Purely from an aesthetic perspective, the swirling kaleidoscopic nebulae filling the endless expanse of the universe are understandably attractive subject matter. Downs not only captures their nebulous mystery with his expertly mixed palette of blues, reds, greens, oranges, and blacks but also in his choice of material. Cosmic Clock’s impressive scale and Downs’ dusting technique (as an appreciator and not a painter, I’m not exactly sure of his process, but pigment dusting tends to be with pastel) mirror Nebulaes' monumental size and dust composed clouds. Furthermore, the fragility of the dusted surface that causes the painting to change with time and circumstance makes it as much a nursery for new paintings as static work. Cosmic Clock, like nebulae, is an unpredictable birthing ground for new expressions of beauty.