It’s been forty days now. Forty days of lockdown. Forty days of staying at home, with few escapes to the studio, more or less voluntarily. I am continuing with the practices I talked about in part one of this diary. I also took up running (with little success) and I’m going for walks round the nearby hill of Lycabettus (a lot better). I am painting in watercolour and working on my collage book ‘New Décor’. I copy stuff and I also do some studies from nature, in the patio here at home when the sun is out.
What is made clearer, now more than ever, is my need for the physical aspect of my practice. The somatic aspect of painting. I miss moving in the open space of the studio, backwards and forwards, in and out of a work, between works, creating space through the movement of the body, recording it in the brush stroke.
Painting is an act.[1] It is a verb. It refers to a process, a practice, not to a product. The act of painting is situated in the now and stands in contrast to Painting with a capital P which refers to the whole sum of the acts of painting, including all its occurrences since its first appearance. However, the two interconnect and painting in the now is always in conversation with Painting as the realm of past artworks.
Painting, considered as an act, can perhaps be seen as a way of recording or making visible a sensation. As such it is putting down on paper a fleeting perception, a tentative image of something in a state of becoming. Clarifying and depicting this sensation or perception is perhaps the life work of any one artist.
Perhaps this is what De Kooning referred to when he said that ‘Content is a glimpse, an encounter like a flash‘.
https://www.dekooning.org/documentation/words/content-is-a-glimpse
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What is my content? It is somewhere there in all my paintings, I can point to it, but I cannot describe it through words, or if I try to, it sounds trivial.
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Deciding to paint according to the view of painting as an act can have no standard to which it has to adhere. It has to find its way by trial and error, although the only way through is informed by Painting and the lessons one learns from its occurrences.
This is how painting is schizophrenic. It has to be at the same time rooted in the tradition of Painting and break free from it.
This relates to the schizophrenic nature of the human reality. What haunts human beings is the need to adhere to a standard, to be correct, to fit in, to be accepted. This is connected to the survival instinct, and to the need to feel gratified and wanted. At the same time, we want to be independent and free, to live how we want to live, to define our own standards.
We have been taught that there is a correct way to do things, a correct way to think, or to paint, or to be in a relationship. That there is a correct way to be. However, what makes one interesting to say the least is the incorrect. It is the little abnormalities, excesses, imbalances, that make a person adorable. Perfect beings are not adorable (perhaps because they don’t exist).
With respect to painting, I never liked perfectly balanced paintings anyway. I was always fascinated with wild, unbalanced, fleshy compositions that broke out of the confines of the rectangle. I was never interested in making a ‘nice’ painting or even a correct drawing.
This painting by Delacroix is one of my favourite paintings. I am also doing some works on this at the moment….
I have started to think, what would happen if I let myself go, if I stop trying to correct the mistakes I do, or perceive that I do, but on the contrary attempt to incorporate them into my practice. For example work with my clumsiness, follow my racing thoughts and desires, my constantly changing focus. Not fight my inability to stick to a specific image or idea for too long. Work with my inability to define things, to place the boundary between them, to tell where one form starts and the other ends. Incorporate the inability to decide what I really want to do or how I really want the painting to look like. What if all these were not perceived as ‘problems’ but as working material.
I am attempting to focus on this as an experiment for the time being. (Not that I don’t question it all the time and feel helpless most of the time). I am mixing many viewpoints and images into one, and working on many themes at the same time, although the overarching themes are eroticism and the relationship of the body to space.
De Kooning had this, again, when, in the same speech he said. ’ I think whatever you have, you can do wonders with, if you accept them’.
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[1] This focus on an activity as a verb is something I came across in this wonderful book I am reading at the moment, ‘The Art of Is’ by Stephen Nachmanovitch.