Thursday, October 15, 2009

Why Do I Paint

As I lay in bed last night, not able to sleep, I thought about painting and about my process in particular. It is one thing to be able to paint, but to verbalize why or how is completely different. When I teach my students I try to get them to pay attention to value and also to notice relationships between shapes in a given space. But last night I began to think about what I think or feel when I paint and what I realized is that I try to define the essence of the object or scene I am painting; for instance when painting glass, what constitutes its essence. It is reflective yet transparent, solid yet liquid, smooth. What about a tree? I remember reading an anecdote, when I was taking a Tai Chi Class, about a Buddhist Master who was visiting a certain monastery and when the Senior Monk met with him in the court yard, it was noted that they sat for a very long time without saying anything at all. Finally, the Master was heard to say to the Monk, "They call that a tree." The anecdote has spoken often to me as a painter. I try to understand what the Monks were witnessing and begin to understand the essence of what makes a tree a tree. It is not just the physicality of the tree, but how the wind rustles the leaves and how the light flutters through them picking up color from the sky in some places and casting shadows in other places. How the birds flit from branch to branch and how the bark of the tree is alive with insects. If you touch the bark, sometimes pieces will come off in your hand and it is so rough. If you can think of an object from this perspective, it will then become possible to paint.

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