Tryangles

Why would anyone ever want to make something that looked like something looked like?

Looking at famous paintings, as I have been in my free time, it looks to me that every time a famous painter makes a brushstroke he or she is trying to become beautiful or famous or powerful or immortal. I have to trust that this is just a phase I'm going through and that I'll go back to my older way of just seeing a famous painting and enjoying it for what it is.

I resist the impulse to ask Joe G, a painter, this question: Joe, have you ever been involved with a painting in which everything you do to it makes it worse and worse? And only when you start to erase things does the painting start to come alive?

I'm afraid I'm at that ciritical juncture where I'm starting to see things only one way.

In language, I never seem quite able to say what I mean to say. I have to say what I mean to say over and over until I get it right, or as close to right as I'm able, and then go over it again in a pen with blue ink; sometimes then the language at least comes close to saying what I'd wanted to say. I like to think it's perfectionism that keeps me from saying what I'd meant to say in the first place, but it's not perfectionism, it's something else to be investigated at a later date.

Brooks RoddanMay 1, 2020