Notes on the Sources of Art

This piece, a cross-post from Horizons of Significance, has grown during the writing, pushed ahead by the ambition of its title, only slightly modified by the insertion of the word “Notes…” I’m resisting the urge to break it up into my customary 1,500 words. I need to break that habit as much as we all need not to get too comfortable with the bite-sized nature of blog posts in general, a “rule” I’ve already stretched with my “average” post!

I’ve had this gestating inside me for a long time. Somehow it has surfaced now, with the catalyst of a post by Achille Mbembe, at the height of the “Dog Days” when we’re all distracted and feeling a bit lazy… So be it! I hope you’ll give it a look, and perhaps save it for later when crisper air brings renewed appetite. This may be as close to a “Manifesto” on Art as I come! So with some trepidation, here are,

“Notes on the Sources of Art”

No Stupid Premise

There is no stupid premise for beginning a painting. No clever ones either. If we begin off-balance and in grave doubt, or in the full flush of confidence in our selves and our gambit; if we are honest and do what the painting asks of us, we will go through the entire range of attitudes towards the work in progress, probably many times. In the end – if there is one – the painting begins to show us, with more and more clarity, what it needs. At the same time both the doubts and demands we put in front of the work recede.

‘There’s a dimension we don’t understand…”

In Stephens’ & Swan’s biography, deKooning,

(Milton) Resnick said,

“There’s a dimension that we don’t understand. In other words, if you have a landscape or an interior you have space. You can deal with it in terms of image or what-not. But you can’t really understand what paint is doing. Paint is doing something that you ask it to do in order to get the nose on somebody’s face. The paint also does something that isn’t the nose on the face. What it does is fascinating. It’s a new geography.”

Drawing Distinctions

Another cross-post from Horizons of Significance,

The following is an address to be given at the first session of a class at a school that as far as I know does not yet exist.  Nor do I know who the students might be, or their circumstances.  What I do know is that I’d like to be there, at the front of that room, confronting their eager or timid faces, with the prospect of a long series of sessions to follow, and more after that.

“Faith, Hope and Impossibility” Philip Guston 1966

A cross-post from Fine Lines,

To will a new form is unacceptable, because will builds distortions.  Desire, too, is incomplete and arbitrary. These strategies, however intimate they become, must especially be removed to clear the way for something else – a situation somewhat unclear, but which in retrospect becomes a precise act….

…The closer I get… the more intensely subjective I become – but the more objective too.  Your eye gets sharper; you become continuously more and more critical.

There is no measure I can hold on to except this… making.

Philip Guston, Faith, Hope and Impossibility XXXI Artnews Annual 1966