We were at a friend's house. They had representational artwork on the walls. One of the children said, "They look like photographs. Not like daddy's pictures." We had a laugh. My wife said, "Daddy's paintings are pictures of his brain."
She was getting in a dig, but also saying something true.
What matters is the representation of what is in the mind. What the eye sees is filtered through the brain. It constructs what it thinks it sees. That is what I want to produce.
Sometimes I am tempted and try to do realism. But I fail because I am not interested enough in it to try at it. Practice makes perfect, but a forty-two year old hobby painter doesn't have time to make pictures like photographs.
The mind seeks freedom in the closed system of computers and bills, commutes and holidays. Art cries out from a hollow depth. It demands time. The medium itself tells the artist what it wants to be.
My paintings have been telling me to smear with a knife; to recover trite canvases from auction and revive them. To let the old texture add to the new picture. I like them better than photographs or cell phone screens with tiny videos. Canvas and paper remain after the death of electrical ephemera. Or if they do not, their corpses are worth more to me than a billion digital copies of Van Gogh's sunflowers.
She was getting in a dig, but also saying something true.
What matters is the representation of what is in the mind. What the eye sees is filtered through the brain. It constructs what it thinks it sees. That is what I want to produce.
Sometimes I am tempted and try to do realism. But I fail because I am not interested enough in it to try at it. Practice makes perfect, but a forty-two year old hobby painter doesn't have time to make pictures like photographs.
The mind seeks freedom in the closed system of computers and bills, commutes and holidays. Art cries out from a hollow depth. It demands time. The medium itself tells the artist what it wants to be.
My paintings have been telling me to smear with a knife; to recover trite canvases from auction and revive them. To let the old texture add to the new picture. I like them better than photographs or cell phone screens with tiny videos. Canvas and paper remain after the death of electrical ephemera. Or if they do not, their corpses are worth more to me than a billion digital copies of Van Gogh's sunflowers.