I had thought that painting was about suffering and building up the surface, but now realize that a thin veil of paint can say something too.
On reading Proust – not from a scholarly approach but experiential. The more you read these long sentences where structure seems to be abandoned, the more you, the reader slows down and the sense of breath becomes present, while the sense of linear time is abandoned. That if we slow ourselves down enough – memory connotes time. Time and memory connote a sense of presence.
David Hare on Vanessa Redgrave playing Joan Didion
” Glacially perfect prose which contains fantastic feeling underneath a formal structure.”
I do not want to be tied to what I see. You do not have to make the case for abstraction or justify.
The painter uses their materials, as a form of alchemy to intuit these patterns on a fictive basis. I am interested in forms that are generated from the internal workings of intuition and thought, and that are independent of what is seen.
A simplified form allows the freedom to delve into the surface more deeply.
Do not be afraid of the mundane.
A paintings limitations and strengths are its surface – and its two dimensionality.
The two dimensional aspect of the image with the three dimensional square or rectangle of the object – a container of feeling. Yes, what meaning does a mark have – can we connect a mark to language? Or can a surface by itself – by just being a surface contain memory and cognition
of the past – present – future.
From the Street of Crocodiles, Bruno Shultz
“The pale pink of human skin, some golden-some blue grey, all flat, warm and velvety in the sun, like sun dials, trodden to the point of obliteration, into blessed nothingness.”
what does this mean to me?
Obliteration of material to light, and in Shultz the premonition of annihilation.
Ambiguity between above and below, between heaven and earth.
Opticality of perception or materiality dissolves into experience of seeing where there is no illusion.