A Love Letter to a Painting
Dear Painting,
We have hit that familiar wall once again in this long-standing relationship of ours. I would quit you if it was not for the trust in our ability to move past these obstacles together. We have done it before and I have faith we can do it again.
I left you last night in frustration as you lay on the studio floor. From my perspective, you behaved like a child in the middle of a tantrum.
My sleep was restless. Colors and shapes took center stage as they kept morphing and manipulating the space in my head.
The next morning I entered the studio to the early morning light streaming in from the east. There you were, right where I left you.
Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
You, a large 78 x 48-foot panel, on the floor with a glaringly obvious discord towards me. As if to say, "how could you abandon me to fend for myself.”
Your pink blob in the upper left-hand corner caught my eye, screaming nonsensical madness. I shouted back, “nope, still now working.”
Originally, I thought we were coming to an understanding, a closure to this mess we had gotten ourselves into, but not this time. A defiant stubbornness had set in for both of us.
My eyes slowly take in the drips of sap green immersed in linseed oil meeting iron oxide red. A dry pigment rubbed with a rag till it took on a life of its own, upon your surface.
I pull up a chair and quietly wait.
What is it I want?
I want you to part the veils and speak a higher octave with me. To visit dimensions beyond the mundane.
I know that when I try to compartmentalize you I am asking for trouble.
So I will try to take in the whole of you.
A radiating red frequency …
Juxtaposed - white - pink- red- green.
I stand up and begin walking circles investigating your angles. Round and round I go until I settle on just how I can make my way into a portal of entry.
Is there a part of you that needs to go that I am unwilling to let go of?
Slowly, something begins to come into focus.
There in the middle of you, spirals that seem to go nowhere. Spirals not quite rotating in or out, completely unrelating to the rest of us.
It’s the part I keep trying to make work. Covering, resurrecting, layer upon layer of paint on top of paint hiding and obscuring, becoming a palimpsest of surface, effaced with traces of beginnings at the end.
Sometimes we can go on like this for days, even months.
“It’s your turn to talk,” I say out loud.
I believe that I hear you saying, let’s move to the details and connect the dots of meaning.
Right, not sure what to do, go to the details till something opens up. An epiphany in waiting for the surprise that lives in the unknowing that keeps us coming back for more.
As I lovingly lift you and put you back on the wall my thoughts drift to another painter who lived many years ago who often expressed his tumultuous love affair with painting, Mark Rothko.
In a letter written in May 1948 to painter Clay Spohn he states:
“I am beginning to hate the life of a painter. One begins by sparring with his insides with one leg in the normal world. Then you are caught up in a frenzy that brings you to the edge of madness, as far as you can go without ever coming back. The return is a series of dazed weeks that brings you to the edge of madness, as far as you can go without ever coming back.”
Those words may seem a bit over the top, daunting even. Rothko was never shy in letting his audience know exactly why he paints.
It was not to bear the title of an abstractionist, or as he put it:
“I’m not interested only in expressing the relationship of color or form or anything else. I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions, tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on. A painting is not a picture of an experience, but is the experience.”
This feels like integrity and truth to me.
I believe whoever says our relationships with painting comes easy is either, lying, or turning out paintings like a factory machine, or they are perpetually just dabbling- forever flirting with the honeymoon phase.
So, Dear Painting, here we are at a transition point. And, I just want you to know, I’m in this with everything I got until we see ourselves on the other side.
Love,
Thank you for reading.
Please let me know your own experience/relationship with your creative process. I would love to hear your thoughts.
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