When I began painting again, I struggled with what to paint. When working as a designer, it was easy to respond to a problem with a given set of circumstances and limitations, and create solutions to serve the purpose. But when you paint, anything is possible. It is a terrible problem. What is the message?
I've experienced what happens when, through sickness or events, you become completely incapacitated. You get to a place where there is nothing but silence and stillness, and then what remains? What rises out of that place? There is something essential underneath it all that is usually drowned out by the business of life.
That is what is happening when I paint; something is rising out of this nothingness, and you look at the results and wonder "where did that come from?"
2 comments:
Hey Bonnie- this is a lovely post- and what is so difficult about being a painter... shutting out the noise and seeing what happens. I love the quote from the film about Philip Guston, "A Life Lived".... you're in the studio with all these other people, and then first the critics leave, then the other painters leave, and then you leave, and then someone stays behind to do the work....I usually know what my work is "about" quite a while after I do it.
Thanks Nancy- yes I think all creatives know this experience. I think of it as asking my left brain to leave the room so my right brain can play unsupervised. Who cares if I make a mess and ruin things? You know the answer.
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