In my tendency to divide everything up and then re-tie it all together, the desire to witness every variant of ourselves contrasted or combined, I'm going back and forth with oil paints and water soluble oils (closer to acrylics) and am still amazed at how the materials and working with them is so symbolic of different ways of going about life. I've been wanting to exercise my 'left brain' (the logical, technical, how to part). Oil paints seem to make logic and order of more necessity- they can be toxic, mixed w/ various chemicals, have the potential for many different manners of application, allow for layering, and take a hell of a long time to dry. They require time, patience and study. With oil painting I'm suddenly allowed an overwhelming amount of possibilities, stemming from a surprising cause; limitation. Painting in my usual method of intuition doesn't quite seem to work, I get going and then realize I have to let this thing dry and this is quite frustrating and unnatural to me. Yet it also offers a new option; deliberation. Because of all the time needed, and some kind of order, I can now consider WHAT I am going to paint prior to painting. Right past the limitation is a dizzying array of options, which require a left brain function- decision making or deduction. I can work from photos, from life, sketch out ideas, or anything. Usually we associate risk taking with emotion, whether it's the harm of recklessness or the glee of spontinaity, but I'm finding the opposite. With my usual work produced in the more chaotic fashion I actually take far less risk; each stroke is an immediate reaction to the last and there is a sense of urgency that only what is happening NOW matters. I believe this requires less risk because I'm rarely aware of what could be lost. With the oil painting I can go over layer after layer and though there's a consolation in knowing I can re-paint areas, sometimes I do that and lose what I was going after. It also allows for more risk and experimentation because while painting I understand that I will approach a piece days or weeks later and that what I am doing in a present moment will become the past and will affect the future.
Our reasoning allows us contemplation and retrospection. Romanticism is whatever it is we care enough about to contemplate and remember.
Good night.
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2 comments:
Hello, Jamie. I have found your new blog. And I read your text, and understand it in a dynamical way. No person saying everything of self. But this published part of it is almost clear for me. You need some help: short rest, nature, freely seeing people, pets, birds, music and poetry. Stop working, just look around. Be stranger. Acacia is blossomed. Your friend David. PS Did you get my old photos of you and wet lilac? I will find you someday.
It is very sad, you did not add some new text. Your writing is the best part of you, as I think. I made new prints of your image. Hope to show them up. Former your friend David.
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