"What I capture", says Kernodle, "is the only possible evidence of paintings that canot exist for any length of time."
Kernodle combines two traditional media to realize something of a netherworld between the two - a style of painting that depends on photography, and a style of photography that depends on painting. Which is it? Kernodle is not satisfied to answer with one or the other. He insists on both at the same time:
"Some people might call what I do "abstract photography"
A Kernodle painting actually exists first as paint - as real-world paint forms flowing in motion. But his painting only exists while fully wet and fully malleable. This is the critical distinction:
His is a different style of painting, an impecably true dynamic style of painting, a focus on events rather than on solid objects. Action painting at its most active. The active painting event has different peak moments. The best of these visual peaks is what Kernodle aims to capture,
These peaks, according to Kernodle, help us visualize and appreciate our complex, always moving reality. They show undeniable proof of form in motion and motion in form. In his words, "Stillness is not absolutely still. What appears still is a stable resonance of interfering patterns, like a standing wave."
From his perspective, no part of existence has ever been completely still, yet humans require appearances of stillness to appreciate life's motion. Again, form is in motion, and motion is in form. Both form and motion enable one another simultaneously. This is the essence of a fluid.
Even the captured image is only a slower form of motion. Like ice, the image is a cube of frozen time, which itself eventually must "thaw" in its own unstoppable passing to erode film, paper, canvas or digital records that imprint it. The slow-moving substance imprints patterns of the fast-moving substance, causing the appearance of stillness.
Kernodle believes that space, time, mass, energy, up, down, ... are not clearly separate divisions. They often are confused ideas about only one dimension, which is existence itself. He suggests that we think best of reality as one perpetually active fluid that forms stable patterns. Between these stable patterns, there is no such thing as empty space, ... only more fluid, which acts as a background for its own stable patterns.
Traditional paintings always have shown only one peak pattern in the flow of many, related patterns. Kernodle's fluidism admits this fact full out. His fluid dynamic images summon the sublime realization that all things are fluid dynamic paintings moving at different speeds. All things are expressions of the fluid universe, rather than mere things that humans alone express.
"I deal with the cosmos in miniature", Kernodle claims. "I bathe liquid with light to illuminate primal shapes and enlighten progressive minds."
Kernodle's images appear on the internet (along with more information)
http://www.geocities.com/
http://thedb.com/
