Painting and thinking.

                                                              Catherine Pamplin. oil on paper.

                                                                      oil on canvas

I had recently, the unusual experience of watching an artist friend work. The painting progressed carefully over the course of an afternoon and provided me with an opportunity to reflect upon another persons process, decisions, revisions, adjustments. One is of course aware that this is always going on but to step outside it and be a quiet observer taught me a lot. I became aware, whilst making the above painting of the movements of my friends work even though it was turned away from me as it dried.

Essentially as an act of creation, it has to engage by making something out of nothing. There is an image in mind sometimes and the painting works towards the realization of the image but at other times the act of painting is the image. The image can be the result of a dialogue that the artist has with themselves but in addition creates an opportunity for a dialogue with the observer and the observer is brought into relation with it. In the case of my friends painting she was setting out, or working out a story, something she was thinking about. It can be read by an observer although the true meaning may remain personal. In my painting, the reading may be more obvious but both paintings develop out of inner dialogue.

Applied to painting, critical thinking too often ends up calling into question the very medium—a deconstructionist impulse that particularly sabotages beginning students. Playing baseball or tennis requires accepting the game as a whole, and so does painting. But unlike baseball or tennis, painting is an open-ended pursuit without any numerical victory or defeat. It’s fraught with subjectivity and uncertainty. It is, as an artist I know has said, one semi-mistaken brushstroke after another applied until a kind of truce against the possibility of a perfect painting is reached. ( Laurie Fendrich) Or as de Kooning thought, starting over at every stage.

 There is a quote from Robert Motherwell which sits well with both of the above paintings. 'Painting is a medium in which the mind can actualize itself. It is a medium of thought. Thus painting, like music, tends to become its own content.