Meditation on Painting
When the brush touches the canvas is the mark it makes true? When I study someone and attempt to paint them, this is something I ask myself.
If truth is context bound then would the mark - the fast line of red, the plane of soft umber – have truth if it didn't relate to other marks? Would it be true if it didn't relate to other acts of looking, of really trying to see the other? One thing we know is the mark by itself likely wouldn't be an accurate portrayal of the person in front of the artist.
It's equally true however that a mark made as the result and process of genuine looking contains the truth of the looking, and contains the truth of the painters perception. It contains the truth of the model also. As these seemingly meaningless parts come together they begin to form a coherent whole. This only happens if each mark has truth.
While some say that the individual mark devoid of context is meaningless if one was to try and create a portrait out of meaningless marks one would be left with a meaningless portrait, with no story to tell, and no life to breathe.
It seems that the part of the image – the individual mark – and the whole of the image – the alive portrayal of another human being – are co-emergent; they both happen at once. The part makes up the whole and the whole embraces and sculpts the part.
This leaves the painter with a challenge – to simultaneously comprehend the person in front of them in their totality and in their constituent parts. The triangle of the cheek, the retreating square of the temple, the somehow jarring shard of light across the smoothness of the neck; how do these form a whole being? One's answer to this has to be given in a single brush stroke enacted again and again to create form, space, relationship and rhythm, and ultimately to give rise to something a viewer can relate to, which is to say give rise to something that's real.
The truth of the life painting studio is therefore not solely in the painter, or solely in the model, but instead the truth converges between the two, in the painting itself, as the hyphen between 'I' and 'Thou,' and as the meeting of 'Me' and 'You.'