More Than A Process, Painting Is Being

No Good To Paint In The Head - What Happens Is What Happens When You Put The Paint Down - You Can Only Hope That You Are Alert - Ready - To See. What Joy It Is For Paint To Become A Thing - A Being. Believe In This Miracle - It Is Your Only Hope. To Will This Transformation Is Not Possible. Only A Slow Maturation Can Prepare The Hand And Eye To Become Quicker Than Ever. Ideas About Art Don't Matter. They Collapse Anyway In Front Of The Painting.

But You Begin To Feel As You Go On Working That Unless Painting Proves Its Right To Exist By Being Critical And Self-judging, It Has No Reason To Exist At All - Or Is Not Even Possible. The Canvas Is A Court Where The Artist Is Prosecutor, Defendant, Jury And Judge. Art Without A Trial Disappears At A Glance.

To Will A New Form Is Unacceptable, Because Will Builds Distortion. Desire, Too, Is Incomplete And Arbitrary. These Strategies, However Intimate They Might Become, Must Especially Be Removed To Clear The Way For Something Else.

The Canvas You Are Working On Modifies The Previous Ones In An Unending, Baffling Chain Which Never Seems To Finish. What Sympathy Is Demanded Of The Viewer? He Is Asked To 'see' The Future Links.

Sometimes I Scrape Off A Lot. You Have On The Floor, Like Cow Dung In The Field, This Big Glob Of Paint... And It's Just A Lot Of Inert Matter, Inert Paint. Then I Look Back At The Canvas, And It's Not Inert - It's Active, Moving And Living.