Phil Illingworth’s forum discussion on Artist Statements has made me wonder how simply it can be written.
I am sitting in front of a painting. Wondering what and how I am thinking, and why. Looking at the surface, imagining possibilities about-for-in-on it. Mix some paint, take up a brush, approach the surface, make the mark-gesture-provocation-response, and look again. Whatever my first reaction, it can quickly change. Immediate reaction is incrementally modified. Or not as the case may be. The reaction is visceral. Disappointment-disapproval the hardest to deal with. Response of pleasure invites suspicion. It’s difficult to go back with an unsatisfactory mark; there is only one direction, which now takes a detour. My mental approach to making the gesture that leaves its mark is that of a moth to a light, a spiral toward something that I wish could satisfy. My physical approach is an act of faith. Looking again, it all begins to look like detour.
Reading Richard Rosch’s post on the Forum ‘Perverse….’ I return to the position that in essence, the practice is its own theory. What is done is what is thought, and consequently thought about. I went to the Ed Ruscha show at the Hayward recently. On close examination, some of the painting asks technical questions. Paint has bled under some letter stencils in a way that looks careless. The work can be read independently of the detail of execution. But how does such ‘carelessness’ (it might be termed ‘accident’) sit in an overall evaluation of his work? A writer is not judged by the formation of handwriting; should a visual artist employing words pay any particular attention to their drawn reality? I enjoyed the show; perhaps I’m nit picking.
