“Destruction takes place so order might exist. / Simple enough. / Destruction takes place at the point of maximum awareness.” Charles Wright “An ever dimmer light.” Samuel Beckett “In every story I tell comes a point where I can see no further.” Anne Carson “That language can suggest a body where there is none.” Rosemarie …
Recently I was describing the complete and utter revolution I’ve experienced in my artistic practice, only to have the listener remark “but that sounds like what all artists do in the studioâ€. At that moment it became clear to me that perhaps I needed to develop my language skills… a bit. But I must say that on some level she is correct. Yes, I am doing what all artists do in the studio. But now I am doing it DIFFERENTLY then I was before.
How many darks are there? Low ceilinged dark, watch your head dark, near to the wall dark, bump your shin dark, inside dark, outside dark? How deep is dark? Something perhaps more considered when black and white is your medium.
“I envy – but I’m not sure that I envy – those for whom a biography could be written, or who could write their own. In these random impressions, and with no desire to be other than random, I indifferently narrate my factless autobiography, my lifeless history. These are my Confessions, and if in them …
Matisse condenses the air – the light is form, the dark is form. What one would pass through is solid while concrete things are but interrupted flickerings; chains of lines flattened onto fields of bright color.
“…at times the spirit…desires a view which is in certain ways restricted and confined… The reason is …the desire for the infinite, because in those circumstances the imagination goes to work instead of the eyesight, and fantasy takes the place of what is real.”
Bolted to DC for two days; Hirshhorn, Yves Klein, blue girls in black in white. Flat fields, objects, moonscapes – all in that vibrant vibrating blue that seems to absorb sound and light alike. A self made monograph of color field paintings cut out of commercial paint chips. Blowtorches and firemen, Yves Klein always in a suit.
“How can we speak of these “common things”, how rather, can we stalk them, how can we flush them out, rescue them from the mire in which they remain stuck, how can we give them a meaning, a tongue, so that they are at last able to speak of the way things are, the way we are?”
Walking along a dirt road how many pebbles would you pick up before you found a second to match the first?
Painting and dreams overlap in their ability to tell us not only convincing truths, but in their ability to tell us equally convincing lies.