Meditation on painting

 

I like to paint. I make no claims about my painting except that it gives me satisfaction to feel the paint slide onto my canvas and sometimes to watch it daub on in interesting patterns. I love the colors I use and the way they go together, 

I just like to paint.

I also like to look at other's paintings. I wonder what those people felt as they made them. I think about why they used certain colors and wonder if it gave them pleasure to look at them. 

I do the same things with my own painting, sometimes feeling as if someone else made them. I can't tell you where the actual ideas come from. I know where they start. That is usually a very conscious decision that soon gets lost once I actually begin, but I don't know why I pick the shapes or colors that end up there. That''s one reason it takes me so long to paint a picture. I can only paint until it feels like I am finished for that day. Then I have to wait until I am called to paint more.

I don't always see what the great art critics say is there. I think colors are personal and shapes even more so. What pleases one person bores another, or even offends some. 

It seems to me that good art is art that makes me want to look at it. It calls to some part of me that is so deep I don't even understand it. Like tendrils of fog it escapes my consciousness and wraps around those things it needs from some primal place.