"Paint records the most delicate gesture and the most tense. It tells whether the painter sat or stood or crouched in front of the canvas. Paint is a cast made of the painter's movements, a portrait of the painter's body and thoughts. The muddy moods of oil paints are the painter's muddy humours, and its brilliant transformations are the painter's unexpected discoveries. Painting is an unspoken and largely uncognized dialogue, where paint speaks silently in masses and colors and the artist responds in moods. All those meanings are intact in paintings that hang in museums: they preserve the memory of the tired bodies that made them, the quick jabs, the exhausted truces, the careful nourishing gestures. Painters can sense those motions in the paint even before they notice what the paintings are about. Paint is water and stone, and it is also liquid thought." --James Elkins, What Painting Is
True? or no...What do you think?
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Notes on making art, by Debra Claffey, a visual artist working with encaustic and oil and whatever else suits.
So great that you have a blog! I have James Elkins book and I have begun to read it many times and his thoughts are so deep and vital that I think about what he says for a long time. I love the poetry that paint is liquid thought. I totally agree! Having just been to the Clark Museum, with quite the collection that records the history of painting, I can see what Elkins is saying. Then on to Mass MOCA, the installations of Petah Coyne and Sol LeWitt seem to drive his point even more!
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