Some of my best paintings lately are on camera - playing with exposure and focus. Where the camera is limited - in making things abstract it loses a sense of form - painting, either acrylic oil or watercolor, can move on from. I remain a modernist - the subject of art is material: founded on the fact of paint or stone or else translating the slippage of the unconscious. Mimesis, Modernism's ostensive nemesis remains - and offers the idolatry of referring aesthetics away to a discussion of resemblances (the catalog of things and the narratives fancied upon them) or else a discussion of intent (what the author meant - as if subjectivity could be quantified). Of course there is slippage. Narratives do creep in, explanations are found for the author's purpose - these are off to the side. The discussion must remain on composition and formal qualities of line and color and materiality.
Now someone might say that in my own work something more seems to be happening. That in my journals and overall output there is evidence of narrative and authorship. My work is about me. I suppose I can't deny that. I fail as a minimalist and slip back into metaphysics. This is the problem of any work containing its opposite. The harder you try to eradicate the opposite, the stronger it becomes. Deleuze can speak of the hidden atheist in each believer, for instance, as well as the hidden believer in each atheist. (see his difference and repetition). Much the way we may come to resemble our enemies the more fiercely we fight them. Perhaps this is why Jesus commands to love our enemies.
With that in mind: I begin from the modernist and formalist point - with a dadaist/ surrealist sensibility. Undoubtedly things cannot remain pure. The career of Guston shows this as well as DeKooning's late work. Purity, while the stock in trade of critics, is not of use to the artist. Or to me. I find I cannot be pure - especially when I'm trying to be pure. I feel this is the best working beginning point for me.
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