Past and Present

" You must avail yourself of the means which you are familiar to the time in which you live. That technique from another era that you employ to speak to men of your time will always be an artificial one, and the people who come after you, comparing this borrowed manner with the works of the era in which that manner was the only one known and understood, and therefor executed in a superior way, will condemn you to inferiority."

Eugene Delacroix 1857

Painting- the Verb

To write about painting without discussing the spiritual would be absurd.

For me, most of the drive that creates toward intuition is both the harmonizing factor and the focus.

Painting is more of a verb than a noun, more like playing or composing for a musician. The painter both paints (plays) and composes at the same time. This always comes from the love of painting (tools, color, history, materials). It is not the illustration of an idea executed as some kind of joke with the most minimal dependancy on the medium.

The painter must be literate, and use it as a tool for gaining insight to his own intellectual endeavor. Painting should not be the illustration of an idea born of the intellectual endeavor.

Dim Light

The painting should be able to show in all of its glory - the strength of light and shade to be appreciated even in dim light. Our optical sensors will only detect values and slight tones. But it still should be what it is.

Stumbling on Truth

Stumbling on the truth. That is what painting can lead to be as you are responding to what you love. The truth has a deep beauty that just kind of happens. This is also the way painting becomes an intellectual endeavor. Sometimes it's fun to just sit in your armchair and decipher what you did.

Writing daily notes about painting is the best way to be interpreted because it will be filled with repetitions and contradictions.

Mysterious Force

"In contrast to common opinion, I would say that color has a force more mysterious and even more powerful; it acts, so too speak, without being aware of it"

Eugene Delacroix

I find the above statement to be one of the most important, but subtle aspects of painting. I have studies color theory deeply, including Munsell's color paths. All of this is very important, but the most important thing that I have learned, is that color is associative. You cannot imagine the effect until you actually put the color next to the other and see. The set of relationships is always different, so my minds eye can sort of see vague ideas of color, but nothing is really seen until it's down.
I like the term speak when referring to color, because it is a language. A language that must be developed by the artist for his own self.

I would like to read more of what Delacroix has to say about color. His descriptions show the infinite complexity that can bring about form and light. But I am interested in content as well. When someone looks at the painting and responds, but cannot explain why.

The biggest challenge has been to focus the painting while retaining the cohesive whole.
The figure in my painting is not necessarily depicted. The relationship between the setting or place, and what is going on in that place is the most important to me.
There has to be the human drama. I don't think that it is necessary for the figure to be stuck in there literally.
Somehow Rothko was able to have the marriage of content and form. There is the human drama without the figure.
Somehow, I want to show the human drama at a closer range than the landscape setting, like Titian, but without the literal depiction.

Nature

The content of a painting is a mysterious activity. It must settle in slowly to the viewer.

Man does not have control over nature anymore than he has control over another person's thoughts. Nature is far more encompassing than we can conceive. In painting, this must be respected.

I love it when the painting begins to speak in its own language, something far deeper than your own literal thoughts or desires.

Of course you have to start those desires and thoughts. There is no way to fake getting to that point.

Content

For a while, each painting is just about sensual delight in paint and material. Then all of a sudden, instead of vague suggestions of images in paint, you start to get the deep slow entrance of content. Content reveals itself in ways that surprise the artist. This the main reason to continue.

Structure

The further I paint, the more complicated the structure gets. The closer I look at nature, the more complicated it is. That said, the hard thing to do is to have a focused, concrete image while honoring the complexities of nature.

Form is now becoming something that is slowly chiseled out of light. Illuminated by relationships of colors next to one another.

In Hollywood classic movies, the magic of night scenes are done with a fake built set. This is the only way to illuminate the sensation one feels at night.
I am interested in the twilight hour or night. I think this is because color is no longer the local description. Form becomes a dance through illumination.

Universal / Tragedy

In Rothko's essay on the plastics in Art, has an interesting view of God and painting. He sees all painting as small variants pointing to a universal God, with inexhaustible variables. He stresses that painting has always been the attainment towards some universal, rather than some imitation of nature. I think that there has to be a direct link to the universal in every painting.

Aristotle says that tragedy has to be about someone great with a major flaw of there own. This can give the catharsis needed for the reader to feel that purification.
Every painting needs to have that human element. I like to use the word tragic, but human drama will also fit.

I don't like to think of my paintings as landscapes. I would rather think of them as scenes where the human element takes place. The difficulty is having it all come together at the same time. The figure and its setting need to come arrive at the same time.

It would be wrong to deny the influence of cinema on my paintings. The element of time in cinema can be translated to painting. The viewer has to learn how to read the painting.
Everyone has the language of categorizing representations and sorting them out in terms of understanding what the are seeing.
I hope painting to be the direct index to what's being said. Pointing to what you want to say like an arrow or a finger. Poets do this through figuration of words and phrases, arranging in a sensuous way to lure the reader to understand by turning the literal meaning to a glimpse with shear delight.