Thinking about the act of painting, why painters paint and the relationship between the reality of the subject matter and how it is expressed through the aesthetic descisions and questions that have to be made over and over when creating a painting. I came across this quote:
Willa Cather, Light on Adobe Walls
“Every artist knows that there is no such thing as “freedom” in art. The first thing an artist does when he begins a new work is to lay down the barriers and limitations; he decides upon a certain composition, a certain key, a certain relation of creatures or objects to each other. He is never free, and the more splendid his imagination, the more intense his feeling, the farther he goes from general truth and general emotion.
Nobody can paint the sun or sunlight; he can only paint the tricks that shadows play with it, or what it does to forms. He cannot even paint those relations of light and shade, he can only paint some emotion they give him, some man-made arrangement of them that happens to give him personal delight, a conception of clouds over distant mesas that makes one nerve in him thrill and tremble. At bottom all he can give you is the thrill of his own poor little nerve – the projection in paint of a fleeting pleasure in a certain combination of form and color as temporary and almost as physical as a taste on the tongue.”
http://paintingperceptions.com/
I have also been wandering why I paint…I asked the man in the studio next to mine…neither of us know why but we just feel we need to! love lesley x
It is a very pleasing, feel good activity Lesley, I can get so absorbed in it, it feels like therapy x