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February 04, 2004
it's not a letter
You don’t start at the top: Dear So and So, and write on down to the love and kisses. A painting has a strange trajectory. A drawing can be analogous with a photograph developing in the tray: coming up gradually all over. But a painting, in oils, comes and goes.
Heavy work produces bold images which subside under subsequent painting. Text is applied and virtually destroyed. The painting takes on a life of its own and begins to dictate the level of painting.
And not all these stages are happy ones, the painting will go through hell [and back]. There will be days when everything seems lost; the marks are too weak or too strong, there is an ugliness about it. The brush strokes, that will eventually sing, lurk and murmur, muttering miserable comments and standing out like a thumb on a pianist’s hand hit by a hammer.
Posted by john at February 4, 2004 11:54 AM
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