Let The Painting Become What It Wants To Be
“Lost”. Acrylic, oil stick, inks, pen on canvas. 24” x 36”. 2015.
Most of the time I begin painting with a specific idea in mind, say, 75% of the time. The other occasions I just let the brush do the talking and I get out of the way. As nice as that sounds, it doesn’t always work and I have to decide whether to white everything out and begin again.
Even when I have an idea in mind, I do not follow any definite scheme. I don’t copy a photograph. I don’t sketch from Nature. That’s not my way. Despite having a good sense of how to proceed I can definitely screw up.
The painting I posted on Sunday July 16, called “Blossoms in Ascension,” began as a field of delicate calligraphic lines that I really liked. I made the lines at home and then at the studio. I applied paint. Not as colouring, but as working with paint. It didn’t work. Instead, I was looking at a mess with some calligraphy. I propped the painting against the wall and began work on two other paintings. I often work on three or four paintings at a time, because I know that at some point I will get stuck, only temporarily, but still stuck. I don’t want to spin ideas and anxieties, so I just move on. At another point I will suddenly know what must happen to the abandoned painting. The answer comes in a flash. In this case, the painting emerged. I kept the calligraphic lines in the centre, and I knew that the blossom shapes I had made in the painting had to be in movement. And I knew it was all about ascension. The knowing part I will not talk about. Every cook has their secrets.
When I was in art school, in one studio class we were gathered around as the prof was critiquing one of the student’s works. The painting was still in its beginning stages, and half the canvas was untouched. One of the students leaned forward and to everyone’s horror he spilled coffee onto the previously untouched area of the canvas. Without waiting more than a couple of seconds, the prof grabbed the rest of the coffee and threw it at the canvas. He then grabbed someone else’s coffee and added that too. He moved the coffee around the canvas and applied a cloth to some areas of spillage. Then he turned to the artist and said, “Work with that.” Whatever the artist had wanted, an accident had created an opportunity for the painting to emerge and become something else. Though this happened more than four decades ago, I remember it very clearly.
Three years ago, I began working on a calligraphic painting with dense lines, delicate lines, mere wisps of lines. I worked a long time. I looked at it and it was meh, it was crap, it was to quote Wolfgang Pauli, a world-famous physicist, “not even wrong!”
But then in the duration of the pause I apply when I work on a few paintings at the same time, I realized that the lines looked like a field of dry grasses. It was my Eureka moment. So without altering what I had already done, I began adding, subtracting, pushing, pulling. The picture of the grasses in my mind.
And the painting became what it wanted to be. I used whatever skill I had to get out of the way at the decisive moments.
So in your work, when it isn’t going your way, remember that the work may be going its own way.
