A painters problem:
A fixed element in a work, such a dried passage where the painting is effectively finished can be a cornerstone around which the work is constructed. It is necessary, but it also hurts. It is often possible to look at a painting and guess which passage was fixed early in the process. It may be a face, or a beautiful passage of drapery, or a brilliant gestural mark, usually it is whatever is so obviously successful that the painter could not bear to efface it even when the painting changed around it until its very existence became a luxury. At first the perfect in the image is a happy discovery, what in French is called trouvaille, and then the painting gathers around it, it wears out its welcome and becomes an annoyance. Often, too, it is possible to see paintings where the perfect place, prematurely fixed, has outlined its value and continues to exist only as a fossil of some earlier notion of what the picture might have been. Paintings tell the story of the creation that way . . . The painting swirls around the fixed spot, protecting and enclosing it like a bandage. But the thoughts rub against it and it aches.
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This section of text from What Painting Is intrigues me for two reasons, the first because its identifies a problems I have found but never identified - now looking back I can remember the attachment felt to certain marks a areas of paint which I often made unconscious of what I was doing. What I mean is that it was never my intention to make that type of mark, which invariably means it cannot be repeated. Because of this, I rarely have the strength to remove this, even if it doesn't work with the scheme. I guess this it because it serves almost as a piece of evidence, one easily removed. It is because of this remnant, stubbornly left, that is the second reason this quote intrigues me. Paintings, of which I have presented very few, till this point, on the blog, seem only to speak of there own narrative; any image/depiction of another narrative presented has not the past and future of its self, its story; the man never moves forward. What it does have, however, is the past mark of the paint in the formation of this narrative. It seems to reach the presented point from a different pathway from say that which occurs in film or photography. So maybe this is how painting presents history; its history. Even it has a possible future; its never immune to continuance past the moment at which it was originally left. By artist returning, or by another's intervention, as proved by the Chapman brothers intervention with Goya's drawings (as an example, obviously similar with drawings, although these have a more evident, less easily erased, past) and others.
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