I haven't posted in a while and haven't painted in a while. After the little show/arts and crafts fair I wasn't in a mood, though I've done a couple small paintings they both suck and I am not sure why I did them; just to do them, I guess, which is perfectly fine.
From time to time I read something someone has to say about painting, and I realize that thinking about painting in that way doesn't make me want to paint. I find this kind of thinking, knowing, takes my joy away. Not words, color and a surface and a question and something to see.
Why? What is painting to me that makes it different? I don't know. Writing is a more disciplined combination of inspiration and craft; teaching is craft mixed with a tincture of inspiration. Dealing with the details of life, paying bills, registering the car, dealing with taxes is craft and nothing else. I think painting is, for me the OPPOSITE end of what appears to be a continuum. Painting is craft learned through joy just as dealing with everyday annoyances is joy (relief?) acquired through craft.
I would differ on a point. Art, like writing, is also a disciplined craft---one must master the medium and the "vocabulary" of artmaking as well as invent one's own visual vocabulary. Without that, artmaking becomes rout memorization.
ReplyDeleteYou're right, Carol. I never meant to imply (because I don't believe) painting is not a disciplined craft. I was trying to lay out a rather personal continuum in this post, I guess. I should have -- I definitely should have -- written, rather than that all-encompassing declarative statement about what "art is" what I really meant which is that, for me, the thinking involved in painting is a counterpoint to the kind of thinking I have to do every day to earn a living.
ReplyDeleteI stop painting (or enjoying it, or painting productively) when the mentality of my job (teaching five sections of business communication semester after semester [thank god I can]) starts pushing its way into my mentality of painting. Teaching I must please and reach students and bosses with their often opposing demands and I have to do this without selling out myself, meaning that teaching requires more stamina than any other quality most of the time.
Painting is (since I haven't made a living at it and don't expect to) the place where the imperatives of whatever medium I'm working with, whatever thing I'm trying to see with my brush and my own skill (or lack of it) come together in their own holy way and I'm not obliged to push my will onto them or anything except allow myself to be taught and to do the best I can. I guess, also, there is the wonderful fact that it's OK if I fail at painting. All I have to do with that failure is learn from it. I have the freedom to be bad at it. I like it when I'm working on a painting and the paint and the surface are telling me, "That's not happening, honey, not with that brush and not with the limits of your ability." I really like being "admonished" by something concrete. My favorite painting so far is one that, by the time it was finished, looked like it was done by three different artists. I was learning so fast, not just to paint, but to see.