Three studies for another conversation.

In painting the space outside my window, a space which shifts backwards and forwards as my perspective changes, I am aware of how limited my focus can be. We think of the grand sweep, the eyes scanning the view left and right, up and down, backwards and forwards but my view is often limited to that moment before the sweep and before my brain brings all that a-priori knowledge into play. I have commented before upon how flat (like stage flats) the view can seem and it is especially so at this time of year with such bright light on the land.

Liberals Are Killing Art

How the Left became obsessed with ideology over beauty. 

I must thank my friend Sharon Knettle for pointing me to this article in The New Republic by Jed Pearl. it was an interesting adjunct to Seeing Through Berger by the late Peter Fuller which I read following on from reading a lot of Berger myself over the years. Peter Fuller edited Modern Painters which was eagerly awaited in our household once upon a time.

Emerging and not emerging

Thinking about what painting is and what it does and what the painter wants and makes happen I was interested in how critics read intentions into painting, often proffering a reading which does not allow for, or goes beyond the simple fact of being in the moment. That there is no more than the subject, the recognition of it and the interchange in paint. It is the paint which is essentially both the transiting vehicle and the subject. Heidegger talks of the subject emerging and not emerging in his writing about Van Gogh's painting of shoes. His is a phenomenological interpretation. In my painting and drawing of the bush, the resulting image is not the bush itself, not even the space out of which the bush emerges and not even my experience of the bush but rather the bush as paint.

A continued conversation with the little bush.

Most of the business of painting is doggedness, a determination to see what more can come of repeated looking, whether it be the ongoing dialogue with the object observed or with the object being made. One can never have too much information or else one would have to invent it but that does not prevent changes being made: I'm thinking of how John Constable would move a willow or change the scale of something to further the composition. Editing becomes necessary often: the painting requires it. The bush is the focus of these paintings and to make it so requires suppressing a lot of information but extracting a lot too.