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January 03, 2006
Keep looking keep painting
You’ve got to keep going - on and on and on and on.
Well okay, you can stop if you want to, the thing is: I don’t want to stop.
I do stop, eventually – when the men in brown coats and white gloves come from the gallery and wrestle the pictures from my easel and drag them from the studio with me hanging onto the bottom edge, weeping. [Meanwhile, back in reality...]
Depends what you’re after. Picasso stopped early when he painted the Boy and White Horse:
Big dark lines describe the shape, only two basic tones give us a suggestion of form. And that was enough for him, the thing he was painting was the attitude, the situation, the relationship. He didn’t need any more paint to do this, and the painting is huge, life-size. He didn’t bother to paint the reins either – they aren’t necessary.
I start with the basic form blocked out in crude tones, and I keep going because I want to describe the form in more detail.
It’s the form I’m trying to capture, not the situation, not a story, not a relationship; just the amazing physicality of the body, and for that I need all the detail I can muster.
Posted by john at January 3, 2006 01:38 AM