Brooks Roddan painter

I've been making paintings and other art 'objects' lately.

As a so-called writer I can now say that painting is more fully a form of play than is writing: I don't know what I'm doing when I'm painting, a great freedom.

And yet making a painting is a solemn thing, more solemn than the making of a poem or a novel. A painting doesn't 'begin in delight and end in wisdom' as a poet said the poem must: a painting begins in madness and ends in the compositional settlement of a disputed territory between two warring tribes.

Painting for some is the consideration by the painter of how much he or she wishes the thing painted to look like it looks like a photograph i.e. what the thing is to the eye. I am neither a painter of representation or of abstraction: it's not that I reject both, it's that I can achieve neither.

The question I ask myself every day as a writer--can literature or should literature in its highest and best form provide the context and information needed to understand one's life AND the information necessary to help a one act in a moral way--I never ask as a painter.

Writing, I come to a time when I can't stand writing, my own or others. It's then that I want to be visually entertained and not to create. I haven't come to that time yet as a painter: painting seems to tolerate both the need I have for entertainment and the need to create.

Watching a movie last night about a a fictional Dutch painter who lived in Ireland, I wrote in a notebook I keep in the room where I was watching it, some bad movies are made better by good actors who know it's a bad movie and some good movies are made worse by bad acting.

I never question whether my painting is good or bad, two persistent questions I have to be hyper-conscious of deleting when writing, so that the writing itself often becomes a kind of struggle between permissison and control.  When painting I just paint, that's all there is to it.

I say this, and yet there comes a time too in painting when some sort of war is declared between the perfection of the original vision and its unrealized execution. The difference between painting and writing then is the degree of expectation the artist holds for the art being made.

Painting, I trust the action and reaction of the painting: the images I make give me the room for imperfection that words often no longer allow me.

Painting, I affirm as I once affirmed when writing that when the artist is making art he or she can't make a mistake.

Detail, 'Mule with Child Plowing a Field of Color', painting, 2016, by the author.