Paint Think

[paintthink]

“It is a feeling thing, to be a painter of things: cars everything, even an imagined Oregon thing or creature or person has essence: paint a rose or a coin or a duck or a brick and you’ll feel it as sure as if a coin had a mouth and told you what it was like to be a coin, as if a rose told you firsthand what petals are, there’s softness and wetness held in a legal of color center and more feeling than an eyelid, as if a duck told you about the combined wet and under dry of its feathers, a brick about the rough kiss of its skin.” -Ali Smith, "How to be Both"

[publicdomainreview]

Watercolour illustrations from Mary Gartside’s An Essay on a New Theory of Colours (1808). Hand-made and unique to each volume, the images have been deemed some of the earlier examples of abstraction in painting. More in our latest post on the site — https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/gartside-theory-of-colours

[paintthink]

Dear Jackie, I guess you didn’t know this but me and Abstraction broke up!!!!! Last summer!!!! Well, I mean, I’ve been feeling like kind of confused for a long time, like years. I’m friends with all of A’s friends and stuff, and I think A’s really cool and I totally learned a LOT from A—but you know what? I don’t want to say anything bad about A, but I have to TOTALLY MOVE ON with my LIFE. I started to really feel like A’s been holding me back and even like kind of manipulative. I mean, when I moved to NYC it was kind of incredible to get to know A … but you know what? I am super worried that when you get really to the core of things, A is just super conceited and can’t talk to me. I feel really bad saying this but I KIND OF WONDER sometimes if A is just DEAD INSIDE. I don’t know, maybe A is like a meal ticket for me. I mean, I get invited to a lot of shows and things because of A, but when I’m there, A just kind of talks to other people. Like I don’t feel A can really concentrate on one person at a time—A always addresses the whole room, if you know what I mean. I mean, it’s not like Representation even knows I exist either. I feel like when I come into the room, R is like all glassy and actually really conservative; it’s a weird feeling, too. But anyway I just started to feel like I can’t be tied down and I have to play the field. I guess all of you know that I was always like that and totally non-monogamous, but that’s why you didn’t hear from me all winter. I totally learned a lot from A, and I even got to be friends w/ Cézanne who I didn’t even LIKE before and now I like totally, like, LOVE, and I super love Cubism, (I am so mad at my friend Kerstin in Berlin because she doesn’t even LIKE Cubism but I feel like Cubism is like so amazing. It’s basically a diagram, if you know what I mean.) OH, and also, I never would have understood Process without A but I just feel like A’s really old friends are just WEIRD. And kind of pompous? Or something? Well, anyway, I feel really bad telling you this, like you’ll be pissed, but I hope you know this has nothing to do with you and I really love you and the part of A’s friends that are really open like you are AMAZING and everything. But basically I kicked A out of my studio this summer, and afterwards I felt really good. I had this amazing fling, don’t tell anyone, but I had this fling with this face, and I don’t know, that was the straw that tipped the iceberg and I just went with it. I feel like me and A can be good friends after a while, though, and I am super hoping that all of A’s friends will still be friends with me, but, sometimes I almost kind of wish, you know, I was sleeping ALONE. You know what I mean???? Love, Amy

-Amy Sillman

[paintthink]

For painters the studio is the Prison House, and paints are the fluids that circulate inside it. Alchemy's lesson here is that everything actually takes place within the body. The insanity of the studio is that it is not architecture- it is not made of wood and cement- but it is nothing other than the inside of the body.

- James Elkins, What Painting Is

[paintthink]

“What matters in painting is the _necessity_ of self-reference, it’s forbidden nature, and the many strange marks it leaves on the work. In Rembrandt’s self-portrait, his skin is paint, and the paint is his skin. Paint refers to itself, smearing over itself, sliding over itself, caressing itself- its illicit sensuality is constantly apparent , a droning sound under all painting.” - James Elkins in What Painting Is

[kitty-n-classe]

Joseph Beuys , 1969

[artspotting]

Jonas Mekas, Diary,  March 28, 2018 …min. 3.20 “… in these times of bigness, spectacles, 100 million dollar movie productions, I want to speak for the small invisible acts of human spirit, so subtle, so small and fragile that they fail when brought out under the clean lights. I want to celebrate the small forms of art, the lyrical forms, the watercolor (?) the sketch, arabesques and triolets and bagatelles and little songs. In the times when everybody wants to succeed and sell I want to celebrate those who embrace social and daily failure to pursue the invisible, the personal -  things that bring no money and no bread and make no contemporary history, art history or any other history.“

[paintedout]

Louise Bourgeois

[paintthink]

The smell of oil paint, Turpentine, and poppyseed oil hung in the air. It never left, no matter how long the windows were left open. It was a special aroma, one I breathed every day, and would probably go on breathing for the rest of my life. I inhaled the air of the studio as if to confirm its presence, then quietly closed the door.

- Haruki Murakami, Killing Commendatore

[paintthink]

Ernesto Neto, Untitled (from the set Ovos), 1993, Line and wax on paper, 63 x 83.5cm

[paintthink]

"There was no guarantee, of course, that the painting would ever be complete. It was still inchoate, something missing. Something that should be there was appealing to the nonvalidity of absence. And that missing element was rapping on the glass window separating presence and absence. I could make out its wordless cry."

Haruki Murakami, Killing Commendatore

[paintthink]

"In my case all painting... is an accident. I foresee it and yet I hardly ever carry it out as I foresee it. It transforms itself by the actual paint. I don't in fact know very often what the paint will do, and it does many things which are very much better than I could make it do." - Francis Bacon

[paintthink]

"In every work of art the subject is primordial, whether the artist knows it or not. The measure of the formal qualities is only a sign of the measure of the artist's obsession with his subject; the form is always in proportion to the obsession." - Alberto Giacometti

[gagosiangallery]

“There is a thing about beauty. Beauty is always associated with the male fantasy of what the female body is. I don’t think there is anything wrong with beauty. It’s just what women think is beautiful can be different. And there can be a beauty in individualism. If there is a wart or a scar, this can be beautiful, in a sense, when you paint it.“ —Jenny Saville On this day, May 7, the painter was born in Cambridge, England. "Jenny Saville: Ancestors” is now on view through June 16 at Gagosian West 21st Street, New York. Go check it out: http://fal.cn/4eps   ____________ Image: Jenny Saville, “Fate 1,” 2018, oil on canvas, 102 3/8 × 94 ½ inches (260 × 240 cm) © Jenny Saville

[ricdragon]

Notes on painting by Hassel Smith, 1977

from the Hassel Smith papers https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/hassel-smith-papers-5714/series-5/box-2-folder-105

[archivesofamericanart]

The papers of Southern California painter and instructor Hassel Smith have been fully digitized: https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/hassel-smith-papers-5714 Hassel Smith (1915-2007) was a Bay area abstract expressionist painter, painting instructor at the California School of Fine Arts, and a lecturer at the University of California. His papers include correspondence, personal business files, teaching files, writings, sketches, printed materials, photographs, and sound recordings.

[paintthink]

The harder truth of the matter is that most drawings are failures and that almost all drawing is merely practice. One draws especially to learn. You learn and you learn and you learn. You are constantly making new connections in your mind. You are constantly trying to stop old connections from redirecting your pencil or from talking your drawing into a muddled death. You are concentrating in a spacialized and extraordinary way. And in the end you are drawing in order to grow within yourself.

Peter Steinhart, in “The Undressed Art; Why We Draw”