Why do I paint?
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Painting is a one-man act. I paint to excite myself.
Painting is the wrestling with the despair of not knowing what to paint, the ambiguity of working through an image. In other words, the struggle of making an image which shakes off all the cliches on the way it becomes, only then the cliche will find its way to come back again, so I stare at it and make sure it will not stain the image, filtering it back to its non-narrative/illustrative state.
“Is it painting a good picture is taking out of as much possibilities of it become potentially bad?” - Gerhard Richter
Every brushstroke is an intentional stab/slash to the canvas, to kill what should be killed (canvas surface, the preceding strokes, the cliche…) in order to violently reach its desirable position in a painting’s hierarchy. A finished drawing is greater than the sum of its parts, but a finished painting has its parts greater than its own. The act of making a stroke alone in a painting, when possible, should be a separate act of intention instead of serving for an overall purpose. Therefore, there is more to see within a painting than the final image of the painting itself.
“A painted line is different from a drawn line” - Luc Tuymans
“How to paint a stroke is different from how to make a stroke in painting” - Robert Longo
To paint is to recreate the realness by escaping the appearance of reality; the moment one tries to only capture the appearance of reality, the more the painting becomes artificial, illustrative either or.
Figure painting is the surgical act of turning the subject inside out physically and instinctually, not the reverse. It’s the nonlinear process of placement of the bone structure, the flesh and skin, and their instinctive hint in their appearance, which I believe always shows. In order to do that, one has to trap the divisions of the sitter/subject, does not means divide the subject into parts and pieces, but into layers of the subject’s image along the time axis, then instinctively lure the instinctive one into the painting. Therefore, I have never painted a self-portrait because I am afraid of just getting an image of my parallel self by refusing the instinctive one. But is not it every painting I painted a self-portrait in a sense, as Francis Bacon said, when looking at a Rembrandt painting, he knows more about Rembrandt than the sitter.
According to Freud, all artists are wounded, distorted psyches that are compensating for various kinds of psychic defects by projecting beautiful stuff onto the Sistine Chapel. I am testing if it is true. (*hysterical laugh). I most of the time live in the background of desperate noise, which is horrible but necessary, only if I don't really know the definition of despair. The despair of failing my obsession to create a new way of making an image, not in the techniques side alone, but a new approach to subject matter, a way to capture fact, or at least the feeling of fact, not the glance of reality, not the attempt trying to understand it, just a record of experiences, of what is not there. “Painting not to render what is visible but to render visible” - Paul Klee. The setting of a painting has to ideally falls in the sweet spot between the spontaneity of a snapshot and the stiffness as in staged photography, which Jeff Wall successfully did with his works. Too much spontaneity, the painting becomes sloppy; too much stiffness leads to illustrativeness.
Most of painters in the past are under the air of religious/imperial structure, they usually have common subject of 3 models: god, man and devil, so the subject usually be set, what they can invent is new techniques, like Giotto invented the new standard of realism and perspective technique of to show depth in his paintings compared to the Egyptian or Romanian, then Masaccio invented the new technique of using light and shade. Uccello took the invention of perspective but used a simple treatment of light setting to depict the form of his subject. Then Fra Fillipo Lippi mastered both the lighting and perspective techniques. Later came the chiaroscuro of Verrocchio, handed down to Leonardo and his fate to construct a painting revolution, inherited by Carravagio and later Goya’s generation, before the transition made by the group of impressionists (Pissarro, Renoir, Monet…) with new techniques of depicting the light. Among those impressionists, Van Gogh invented a technique of introducing invisible forces into his paintings.
Today's paintings, let alone the invention of the camera in parentheses, counting from the surrealism, are totally in opposition with the preceding works in the history of painting; nobody tells the painters what to paint, therefore the content and subject matter choice becomes so important, if not crucial. Of course there were painters who still invented new painting techniques such as Max Ernt with his “frottage” and “ grattage”, but likely seems the content is starting to get the upper hand. The word “Sur-realism” with the hyphen in between was coined by Guillaume Apollinaire, then Andre Breton took the hyphen away, the word relates to something more real than real and dreams, which Sigmund Freud put a heavy dense on, the content has now conquered the crucial role. Painting technique, although still important, becomes a subset of a painting’s content. There is an amazing text by Thomas McEvilley written about the content of a painting called: “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”. He stated:
“1. Content that arises from the aspect of the artwork that is understood as
representational.
2. Content arising from verbal supplements supplied by the artist.
3. Content arising from the genre or medium of the artwork.
4. Content arising from the material of which the artwork is made.
5. Content arising from the scale of the artwork.
6. Content arising from the temporal duration of the artwork.
7. Content arising from the context of the work.
8. Content arising from the work's relationship with art history.
9. Content that accrues to the work as it progressively reveals its destiny through
persisting in time.
10. Content arising from participation in a specific iconographic tradition.
11. Content arising directly from the formal properties of the work.
12. Content arising from attitudinal gestures (wit, irony, parody, and so on) that may
appear as qualifiers of any of the categories already mentioned.
13. Content rooted in biological or physiological responses, or in cognitive awareness of them.”
Painting is the experience with time and through time. Although painting looks like the physical act of transferring time into static space since one can witness the similarity between each stroke as a movement of a clock’s hands (which is a metaphorical interpretation of time through motion of space), it depicts time in a very different way as opposed to a clock; to paint is to experience the intangible flow of time. It is what Henri Bergson called “la durée”; painting is a continuous flow of consciously making diverse strokes in divided moments in the stream of interpenetration of past, present, and future. One can easily differentiate “la durée” presented in Lucian Freud’s painting, compared to Picasso's. Therefore, to judge each stroke if it is good or bad while in the process of painting, the painter can apply sets of dualism which are extracted from the characteristics of time and space to use as references (heterogeneous - homogeneous, irreversible - reversible, irreplaceable - replaceable, unique - ununique, dynamic - static, continuity - measurable...).
Painting starts with the painter's instinct and finishes with the painter’s criticism. Who makes better paintings is the one who makes better criticism; a threshold decides when a painting is finished.
PS: My birthday is one day before Francis Bacon.
Painting is a one-man act. I paint to excite myself.
Painting is the wrestling with the despair of not knowing what to paint, the ambiguity of working through an image. In other words, the struggle of making an image which shakes off all the cliches on the way it becomes, only then the cliche will find its way to come back again, so I stare at it and make sure it will not stain the image, filtering it back to its non-narrative/illustrative state.
“Is it painting a good picture is taking out of as much possibilities of it become potentially bad?” - Gerhard Richter
Every brushstroke is an intentional stab/slash to the canvas, to kill what should be killed (canvas surface, the preceding strokes, the cliche…) in order to violently reach its desirable position in a painting’s hierarchy. A finished drawing is greater than the sum of its parts, but a finished painting has its parts greater than its own. The act of making a stroke alone in a painting, when possible, should be a separate act of intention instead of serving for an overall purpose. Therefore, there is more to see within a painting than the final image of the painting itself.
“A painted line is different from a drawn line” - Luc Tuymans
“How to paint a stroke is different from how to make a stroke in painting” - Robert Longo
To paint is to recreate the realness by escaping the appearance of reality; the moment one tries to only capture the appearance of reality, the more the painting becomes artificial, illustrative either or.
Figure painting is the surgical act of turning the subject inside out physically and instinctually, not the reverse. It’s the nonlinear process of placement of the bone structure, the flesh and skin, and their instinctive hint in their appearance, which I believe always shows. In order to do that, one has to trap the divisions of the sitter/subject, does not means divide the subject into parts and pieces, but into layers of the subject’s image along the time axis, then instinctively lure the instinctive one into the painting. Therefore, I have never painted a self-portrait because I am afraid of just getting an image of my parallel self by refusing the instinctive one. But is not it every painting I painted a self-portrait in a sense, as Francis Bacon said, when looking at a Rembrandt painting, he knows more about Rembrandt than the sitter.
According to Freud, all artists are wounded, distorted psyches that are compensating for various kinds of psychic defects by projecting beautiful stuff onto the Sistine Chapel. I am testing if it is true. (*hysterical laugh). I most of the time live in the background of desperate noise, which is horrible but necessary, only if I don't really know the definition of despair. The despair of failing my obsession to create a new way of making an image, not in the techniques side alone, but a new approach to subject matter, a way to capture fact, or at least the feeling of fact, not the glance of reality, not the attempt trying to understand it, just a record of experiences, of what is not there. “Painting not to render what is visible but to render visible” - Paul Klee. The setting of a painting has to ideally falls in the sweet spot between the spontaneity of a snapshot and the stiffness as in staged photography, which Jeff Wall successfully did with his works. Too much spontaneity, the painting becomes sloppy; too much stiffness leads to illustrativeness.
Most of painters in the past are under the air of religious/imperial structure, they usually have common subject of 3 models: god, man and devil, so the subject usually be set, what they can invent is new techniques, like Giotto invented the new standard of realism and perspective technique of to show depth in his paintings compared to the Egyptian or Romanian, then Masaccio invented the new technique of using light and shade. Uccello took the invention of perspective but used a simple treatment of light setting to depict the form of his subject. Then Fra Fillipo Lippi mastered both the lighting and perspective techniques. Later came the chiaroscuro of Verrocchio, handed down to Leonardo and his fate to construct a painting revolution, inherited by Carravagio and later Goya’s generation, before the transition made by the group of impressionists (Pissarro, Renoir, Monet…) with new techniques of depicting the light. Among those impressionists, Van Gogh invented a technique of introducing invisible forces into his paintings.
Today's paintings, let alone the invention of the camera in parentheses, counting from the surrealism, are totally in opposition with the preceding works in the history of painting; nobody tells the painters what to paint, therefore the content and subject matter choice becomes so important, if not crucial. Of course there were painters who still invented new painting techniques such as Max Ernt with his “frottage” and “ grattage”, but likely seems the content is starting to get the upper hand. The word “Sur-realism” with the hyphen in between was coined by Guillaume Apollinaire, then Andre Breton took the hyphen away, the word relates to something more real than real and dreams, which Sigmund Freud put a heavy dense on, the content has now conquered the crucial role. Painting technique, although still important, becomes a subset of a painting’s content. There is an amazing text by Thomas McEvilley written about the content of a painting called: “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”. He stated:
“1. Content that arises from the aspect of the artwork that is understood as
representational.
2. Content arising from verbal supplements supplied by the artist.
3. Content arising from the genre or medium of the artwork.
4. Content arising from the material of which the artwork is made.
5. Content arising from the scale of the artwork.
6. Content arising from the temporal duration of the artwork.
7. Content arising from the context of the work.
8. Content arising from the work's relationship with art history.
9. Content that accrues to the work as it progressively reveals its destiny through
persisting in time.
10. Content arising from participation in a specific iconographic tradition.
11. Content arising directly from the formal properties of the work.
12. Content arising from attitudinal gestures (wit, irony, parody, and so on) that may
appear as qualifiers of any of the categories already mentioned.
13. Content rooted in biological or physiological responses, or in cognitive awareness of them.”
Painting is the experience with time and through time. Although painting looks like the physical act of transferring time into static space since one can witness the similarity between each stroke as a movement of a clock’s hands (which is a metaphorical interpretation of time through motion of space), it depicts time in a very different way as opposed to a clock; to paint is to experience the intangible flow of time. It is what Henri Bergson called “la durée”; painting is a continuous flow of consciously making diverse strokes in divided moments in the stream of interpenetration of past, present, and future. One can easily differentiate “la durée” presented in Lucian Freud’s painting, compared to Picasso's. Therefore, to judge each stroke if it is good or bad while in the process of painting, the painter can apply sets of dualism which are extracted from the characteristics of time and space to use as references (heterogeneous - homogeneous, irreversible - reversible, irreplaceable - replaceable, unique - ununique, dynamic - static, continuity - measurable...).
Painting starts with the painter's instinct and finishes with the painter’s criticism. Who makes better paintings is the one who makes better criticism; a threshold decides when a painting is finished.
PS: My birthday is one day before Francis Bacon.