"Fit your parts into one another and build up your figure as a carpenter does a house. Everything must be constructed - built up of parts that make a unit: a tree like a human body, a human body like a cathedral." -Matisse
What can be art
What art can be
"...one of the fundamental points about Cubism is this: not only did we try to displace reality. Reality was in the painting... We always had the idea that we were realists, but in the sense of the Chinese who said 'I don't imitate nature; I work like her'. "
Just because you don't know where you're going, doesn't mean you won't end up somewhere.
"The painter is revealed to be the true subject of the painting, for it is on him that the psychic as well as physical pressure of space is exerted, rather than leading out in the opposite direction. As Matisse says, 'It is the tremor of the individual that counts, rather than the object which produced the emotion'." -Picasso
I've been doing work from imagination that at points and for fleeting moments becomes real and representational to me. Typically I'm amused by that acknowledgment of some thing I see, a face, an animal or something like that. But I resist pursuing a close visual representation of that thing. Think for a moment about the form of a cloud as it blows by, unbearably slow, but constant. For a few moments, a minute or so, your mind recognizes, in the masses of clouds, a face. And sometimes the friend next to you can't see it, no matter how much you point and gesture in the air, making graceful drawing marks on the sky with your hand. And by this point the clouds have moved on. The face melts and distorts and finally is gone. It only looked like that one thing to you from your exact perspective for that few moments in time that will not and cannot ever happen again.
This is how I've worked on the paintings for this show. I create forms from my mind; just colors and shapes that are floating around in my head (like clouds). Then my mind sees something it recognizes from it's visual repertoire and as I'm making the marks, I begin to make them as if I were painting that thing; rigid architectural lines, rounded arabesque muscle like forms, plant life, birds. But before the image becomes a literal representation of that object, I try to obscure it. Let the form be what it is, not project that "reality" on it. Leave the ambiguity there so that the viewer can also have those moments of discovery that I delight in so much as I work. What I "see in the clouds" so to speak as I'm working tells me something about myself, and it's my hope that the viewer then learns something about themselves as well.
"I believe the work of art to be the product of calculation, but such calculations are often unknown to the author himself... Or one should presume, as Rimbaud said, that in us it is the other who calculates." -Picasso
A korf is a tiger.
"If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it." -Albert Einstein
