DIARY OF A LAPSED PAINTER (2)
“It speaks in the second person.”
“May you embrace, in spirit, the companion your attrition keeps you from embracing in body!”
“all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.”
To make art is to fall.
You have a notebook. You resist & ride compositions that are too agreeable with the margined perimeter. You jot down words as if shapes, jots that are made on the huff, like a toddler's falling momentum.
Although falling, letter by letter, word after word, you stutter purposefully between colour, scale, speed, direction, the formal & conceptual implications of which are manifold or stultifying, leading or ending, falling headlong towards a whole, a particular whole—wholeness being something the artist sets out to arrive at, a wholeness of missing parts that are all the more whole for some reason that has to do with the risk of reciprocity not being met in the burden of sharing wholeness with You.
How much confidence do you have in You to wrestle with those yawning white absences where nothing & everything happens?
You have lost that one painting, but you still try & wring it out for something you can use for the next one, something that will save the next one.
Art is a social act. You make it in anticipation of You. It cannot just attend to you & your needs & fears, your perfecting eyes, your duty & delusion.
Eyes that want to witness everything in the whole, rounded & shorn of your edges. You, the object, front, back, sides, with a mirror held up to reveal your history, your blind spots. You were brought up on colouring books & cookie-cutters.
You want art that rolls up your sleeves, wraps your waist, loosens your straps,
unbuttoned.