Clarity & Televised Golf

I've nearly completed my bookcase painting. This is a big deal only because over the last year and a half I just over-painted things or refused to finish them. So when I came in with a cup of coffee the other morning and realized I had nothing else, it was an unfamiliar feeling again.

Towards the end I read Laura Newman's words: "I want my paintings to exist at the point where form takes on meaning..."(via Two Coats of Paint). And I thought this was a perfect way to describe the intermediary distance between figurative and abstract representations. And it's even a better way to describe what I've been thinking about: articulating things without showing them.

I also thought Jonah Lehrer's (of Proust Was a Neuroscientist) article (here) on how modern mediums influence our difficulty in perceiving the message - specifically with books and reading - was apt for painting as well. Good paintings never quite articulate everything, leaving that small space of doubt or ambiguity. Lehrer talks about the inconsistencies of ink on paper vs e-readers. But I think it compares to simply looking in general. I believe a painting might have more to tell us if it doesn't tell us everything.

And lastly, maybe in the spirit of drawing conclusions, while drawing the other day I determined drawing from life works for me because it moves. Simple enough right? But while I used alot of information from photographs - it's the actual activity, like a cafe setting, where figures and variables come in to play that I react to. It makes me re-evaluate everything over and over, as a photograph, or a still model never does. It moves. And that's what I want my paintings to do.