Al Held was my teacher at Yale; we met in 1971. Our first sentence to each other was this: He said, “So, you’re the new dumb blonde?” and I said, “Who are you, the janitor?” He always demanded that I not be that dumb blonde, that I ask questions. His loss in my life was a big deal.
Materials just get handled the way you handle them. So it doesn’t really matter. Like, I don’t feel like there’s one material that’s sort of mine.
I probably have a problem with ideas. Most of the art world is idea-based: this means this; this means that. But I’m really trying to get to something very emotional and murky- more sensation and emotion than idea. Black-and-white is not an idea, but it’s based on something … It’s life-based- what you gather and try to document. You keep in touch with who you are.
I try to tell my students not to listen to music while they are painting. They might be making terribly expressive paintings, or quiet paintings, but they’ve got this music pounding in their ear. I ask them what they are listening to, and it has nothing to do with what they are working on. I tell them they should listen to the sound of the brush. I’m sure Rembrandt did. Imagining the noise of a Rembrandt is a total explanation of what it is. The noise is the explanation for the paintings. He didn’t have chamber music playing in the background. He had the noise of the painting, the noise of the brush. If you look at a Goya, you see these wonderful things. He knew how to kiss the surface, in the most sensuous way. And it’s all to do with sound.
Because the ‘impossible’ paradoxes of the Incarnation, under cover of divine transcendence, touched the very heart of an imminence that we might qualify, with Freud, as metapsychological— the imminence of this human capacity to invent impossible bodies … in order to know something of real flesh, of our mysterious, our incomprehensible flesh. This capacity is properly called the power of figurability.
I never wanted color to be color. I never wanted texture to be texture, or images to become shapes. I wanted them all to fuse into a living spirit.
These rough sketches, which are born in an instant in the heat of inspiration, express the idea of their author in a few strokes, while on the other hand too much effort and diligence sometimes saps the vitality and powers of those who never know when to leave off.
Recently a promising young artist was confronted by the following dilemma. After years of working hard to produce and promote her work to critics and dealers, she encountered a critic whose response to her work was enthusiastic and fervent. He proposed a major, comprehensive article on her work to appear in a major art magazine. Of course, the artist was delighted. Unfortunately, she felt that he had completely misunderstood her work. At the same time, she was offered the opportunity to write an article on her work in a much lesser-known, artists-run publication. Of course, she could not do both. She would lose the critic’s support, and all the recognition and financial support that would bring, if she made clear her rejection of his reading of her work. If she allowed him to write the article, on the other hand, she would lose control over the public meaning of her work. She decided that economic support for her work was more important, declined the offer to write about her own work, and let him write the article instead.
Painting has to get back to its original goal, examining the inner lives of human beings.
Art history – what does it mean for a painter? Most painting is a conversation between continuity and novelty. The latter will get you attention, which can be habit forming. Some people seem to think that continuity, or tradition, is a narrowing down – what’s left over after the innovators have moved on. But in practice, it’s an enlargement of the painter’s sphere; a reweaving of the web of connections. It’s what most painters feel as their work evolves. Continuity is the dialogue a painter carries on with himself in the guise of his precursors. You push off from your forebears only to find yourself merged with them in the end.
– David Salle, in How to See (via ricdragon)
