Journal of a new painting

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.

In the art I'm most interested in it's all uncertainty from the very beginning. The time is right to make this kind of art.

You have to be a little afraid to make the next move. It's the smiling kind of fear though, that once you've made it you've done the right thing.

There's something to be said for having fun while making art. I'm not exactly sure that fun is the right word, but it will do because I trust you know what I mean.

When someone asks me, how do you paint? I say I paint like the monkey who sits in front of the typewriter and bangs on the typewriter keys for twenty years until he's written the great American novel. This is hyperbole of course, though it is possible the monkey might write a short love poem in the manner of e.e.cummings.

Earlier I'd written about fear in the beginning, and then a little bit about the fun to be had while making something out of the fear. I now want to address the end.

I reject the famous notion that a painting is never finished, that it is only abandoned. I think it was Apollinaire who made the abandonment statement and Apollinaire wasn't a painter, he was a poet and critic. If it wasn't Apollinaire it was someone else, for it's a famous notion but I don't think it's true.

Take for instance the painting just painted, "Tryangles." The painting was made of four colors--Cadmium red, Dioxazine purple, Cadmium yellow, and Mars black--and was finished when the painter ran out of paint.

 "Tryangles", acrylic on canvas, 20" x 20", 2020. Photo by author.