Philip
Braham
LUX
In 2001, I began a series of paintings entitled “Lux” that acted as a complement to the night-photograph sequence “Lumen”. These are medieval terms for two different aspects of light. Lux was understood as the divine light of God, pure and unknowable. Lumen was merely the reflection of this divine light, and it illuminated our world and our minds. I use the distinction as a metaphor for the inner and hidden world of our being, and its extension as the exterior and observable world we inhabit.
The “Lux” paintings represent landscape in its most pared down form; a division of sky and endlessly receding horizon set against a foreground of undulating water. These are the fundamental prerequisite elements for life to exist. Each of the 21 paintings is infused with a different quality of light, and consequently charged with varying intensity, but they are unerringly inward -looking, as they offer no narrative reading beyond their minimal content and intimate scale.
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