Tag: painting

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Amy Sillman

Dear Jackie,

I guess you didn’t know this but me and Abstraction broke up!!!!! Last summer!!!! Well, I mean, I’ve been feeling like kind of confused for a long time, like years. I’m friends with all of A’s friends and stuff, and I think A’s really cool and I totally learned a LOT from A—but you know what? I don’t want to say anything bad about A, but I have to TOTALLY MOVE ON with my LIFE. I started to really feel like A’s been holding me back and even like kind of manipulative. I mean, when I moved to NYC it was kind of incredible to get to know A … but you know what? I am super worried that when you get really to the core of things, A is just super conceited and can’t talk to me. I feel really bad saying this but I KIND OF WONDER sometimes if A is just DEAD INSIDE. I don’t know, maybe A is like a meal ticket for me. I mean, I get invited to a lot of shows and things because of A, but when I’m there, A just kind of talks to other people. Like I don’t feel A can really concentrate on one person at a time—A always addresses the whole room, if you know what I mean. I mean, it’s not like Representation even knows I exist either. I feel like when I come into the room, R is like all glassy and actually really conservative; it’s a weird feeling, too. But anyway I just started to feel like I can’t be tied down and I have to play the field. I guess all of you know that I was always like that and totally non-monogamous, but that’s why you didn’t hear from me all winter. I totally learned a lot from A, and I even got to be friends w/ Cézanne who I didn’t even LIKE before and now I like totally, like, LOVE, and I super love Cubism, (I am so mad at my friend Kerstin in Berlin because she doesn’t even LIKE Cubism but I feel like Cubism is like so amazing. It’s basically a diagram, if you know what I mean.) OH, and also, I never would have understood Process without A but I just feel like A’s really old friends are just WEIRD. And kind of pompous? Or something? Well, anyway, I feel really bad telling you this, like you’ll be pissed, but I hope you know this has nothing to do with you and I really love you and the part of A’s friends that are really open like you are AMAZING and everything. But basically I kicked A out of my studio this summer, and afterwards I felt really good. I had this amazing fling, don’t tell anyone, but I had this fling with this face, and I don’t know, that was the straw that tipped the iceberg and I just went with it. I feel like me and A can be good friends after a while, though, and I am super hoping that all of A’s friends will still be friends with me, but, sometimes I almost kind of wish, you know, I was sleeping ALONE. You know what I mean????

Love,

Amy

Amy Sillman
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For painters the studio is the Prison House, and paints are the fluids that circulate inside it. Alchemy’s lesson here is that everything actually takes place within the body. The insanity of the studio is that it is not architecture- it is not made of wood and cement- but it is nothing other than the inside of the body.

James Elkins, What Painting Is
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The slowness of painting—both in its creation and in its apprehension by viewers—is routinely overlooked because it is so often taken for granted. Compared to digital media, painting is always slow. When painters seek to speed up the medium—offering quickly rendered “fast takes”—they are often doing so to self-reflexively critique art’s commodification. In Richard Prince’s work, for example, this fast take can be read as a deliberate strategy to reveal the problematic nature of viewing painting under the deadening realities of contemporary capitalism—a realization that supposedly prompts further thought. But it feels deflationary with respect to the multiple levels of the experience of time that painting may address.

Stephen Westfall, “Slow Painting,” in Art In America, https://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/magazines/slow-painting/
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“There’s no real difference between figurative painting or abstract painting, ‘cause it’s all painting to begin with… You don’t’ have to follow any rules as a painter. If you’re making an abstract painting it doesn’t mean eventually it can’t morph into a figurative one.”

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)
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It’s not a matter of painting life. It’s a matter of giving life to paint.

Bonnard, as quoted in Timothy Hyman’s ‘Bonnard’
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I stand in a corner of the room, near to this table bathed in sunlight. The eye sees distant masses as having an almost linear aspect, without relief, without depth. But near objects rise up towards it. The sides trail away. And these shifts are sometimes rectilinear – for what is distant; sometimes curved – for planes that are near. The vision of distant things is a flat vision. It is the near planes which give the idea of the cosmos as the human eye sees it, of a universe that is rolling, or convex, or concave…

Bonnard, in an interview with Charles Terrasse, 1927

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To paint is to love again. It’s only when we look with eyes of love that we see as the painter sees. His is a love, moreover, which is free of possessiveness. What the painter sees he is duty-bound to share. Usually he makes us see and feel what ordinarily we ignore or are immune to. His manner of approaching the world tells us, in effect, that nothing is vile or hideous, nothing is stale, flat and unpalatable unless it be our own power of vision. To see is not merely to look. One must look-see. See into and around.

Henry Miller, from “To Paint is to Love Again”