"Inspiration is for amateurs...the rest of us just show up and get to work."-- Chuck Close Find more paint at http://www.rachelahavarosenfeld.com/
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When we meet a work of art, there’s something about that encounter that isn’t fixed in time, but rather, it unfixes time: the shaft opens. The past and present exist in the same moment, and we know, as beings, that we are connected. All the people who lived before us, all who will come after us, are connected in this moment.
Ali Smith (via austinkleon)
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Richard Shift - Less Dead
from the catalogue of Marlene Dumas: Measuring your own grave (ed. Cornelia Butler)
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“May I repeat what I told you here: treat nature by the cylinder, the sphere, the cone, everything in proper perspective so that each side of an object or a plane is directed towards a central point. Lines parallel to the horizon give breadth, that is a section of nature or, if you prefer, of the spectacle that the Pater Omnipotens Aeterne Deus spreads out before our eyes. Lines perpendicular to this horizon give depth. But nature for us men is more depth than surface, whence the need of introducing into our light vibrations, represented by reds and yellows, a sufficient amount of blue to give the impression of air.”
— Paul Cézanne, letter to Emile Bernard, 15 April 1904, from Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics, by Herschel B. Chipp
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Essays
Here’s a (non-exhaustive) list of essays I like/find interesting/are food for thought; I’ve tried to sort them as much as possible. The starred (*) ones are those I especially love
also quick note: some of these links, especially the ones that are from books/anthologies redirect you to libgen or scihub, and if that doesn’t work for you, do message me; I’d be happy to send them across!
Literature + Writing
Godot Comes to Sarajevo - Susan Sontag
The Strangeness of Grief - V. S. Naipaul*
Memories of V. S. Naipaul - Paul Theroux*
A Rainy Day with Ruskin Bond - Mayank Austen Soofi
How Albert Camus Faced History - Adam Gopnik
Listen, Bro - Jo Livingstone
Rachel Cusk Gut-Renovates the Novel - Judith Thurman
Lost in Translation: What the First Line of “The Stranger” Should Be - Ryan Bloom
The Duke in His Domain - Truman Capote*
The Cult of Donna Tartt: Themes and Strategies in The Secret History - Ana Rita Catalão Guedes
Never Do That to a Book - Anne Fadiman*
Affecting Anger: Ideologies of Community Mobilisation in Early Hindi Novel - Rohan Chauhan*
Why I Write - George Orwell*
Rimbaud and Patti Smith: Style as Social Deviance - Carrie Jaurès Noland*
Art + Photography (+ Aesthetics)
Looking at War - Susan Sontag*
Love, sex, art, and death - Nan Goldin, David Wojnarowicz
Lyons, Szarkowski, and the Perception of Photography - Anne Wilkes Tucker
The Feminist Critique of Art History - Thalia Gouma-Peterson, Patricia Mathews
In Plato’s Cave - Susan Sontag*
On reproduction of art (Chapter 1, Ways of Seeing) - John Berger*
On nudity and women in art (Chapter 3, Ways of Seeing) - John Berger*
Kalighat Paintings - Sharmishtha Chaudhuri
Daydreams and Fragments: On How We Retrieve Images From the Past - Maël Renouard
Arthur Rimbaud: the Aesthetics of Intoxication - Enid Rhodes Peschel
Cities
Tragic Fable of Mumbai Mills - Gyan Prakash
Whose Bandra is it? - Dustin Silgardo*
Timur’s Registan: noblest public square in the world? - Srinath Perur
The first Starbucks coffee shop, Seattle - Colin Marshall*
Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, Mumbai’s iconic railway station - Srinath Perur
From London to Mumbai and Back Again: Gentrification and Public Policy in Comparative Perspective - Andrew Harris
The Limits of “White Town” in Colonial Calcutta - Swati Chattopadhyay
The Metropolis and Mental Life - Georg Simmel
Colonial Policy and the Culture of Immigration: Citing the Social History of Varanasi - Vinod Kumar, Shiv Narayan
A Caribbean Creole Capital: Kingston, Jamaica - Coln G. Clarke (from Colonial Cities by Robert Ross, Gerard J. Telkamp
The Colonial City and the Post-Colonial World - G. A. de Bruijne
The Nowhere City - Amos Elon*
The Vertical Flâneur: Narratorial Tradecraft in the Colonial Metropolis - Paul K. Saint-Amour
Philosophy
The trolley problem problem - James Wilson
A Brief History of Death - Nir Baram
Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical - John Rawls*
Should Marxists be Interested in Exploitation? - John E. Roemer
The Discomfort You’re Feeling is Grief - Scott Berinato*
The Pandemic and the Crisis of Faith - Makarand Paranjape
If God Is Dead, Your Time is Everything - James Wood
Giving Up on God - Ronald Inglehart
The Limits of Consensual Decision - Douglas Rae*
The Science of “Muddling Through” - Charles Lindblom*
History
The Gruesome History of Eating Corpses as Medicine - Maria Dolan
The History of Loneliness - Jill Lepore*
From Tuskegee to Togo: the Problem of Freedom in the Empire of Cotton - Sven Beckert*
Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism - E. P. Thompson*
All By Myself - Martha Bailey*
The Geographical Pivot of History - H. J. Mackinder
The sea/ocean
Rim of Life - Manu Pillai
Exploring the Indian Ocean as a rich archive of history – above and below the water line - Isabel Hofmeyr, Charne Lavery
‘Piracy’, connectivity and seaborne power in the Middle Ages - Nikolas Jaspert (from The Sea in History)*
The Vikings and their age - Nils Blomkvist (from The Sea in History)*
Mercantile Networks, Port Cities, and “Pirate” States - Roxani Eleni Margariti
Phantom Peril in the Arctic - Robert David English, Morgan Grant Gardner*
Assorted ones on India
A departure from history: Kashmiri Pandits, 1990-2001 - Alexander Evans *
Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World - Gyan Prakash
Empire: How Colonial India Made Modern Britain - Aditya Mukherjee
Feminism and Nationalism in India, 1917-1947 - Aparna Basu
The Epic Riddle of Dating Ramayana, Mahabharata - Sunaina Kumar*
Caste and Politics: Identity Over System - Dipankar Gupta
Our worldview is Delhi based*
Sports (you’ll have to excuse the fact that it’s only cricket but what can i say, i’m indian)
‘Massa Day Done:’ Cricket as a Catalyst for West Indian Independence: 1950-1962 - John Newman*
Playing for power? rugby, Afrikaner nationalism and masculinity in South Africa, c.1900–70 - Albert Grundlingh
When Cricket Was a Symbol, Not Just a Sport - Baz Dreisinger
Cricket, caste, community, colonialism: the politics of a great game - Ramachandra Guha*
Cricket and Politics in Colonial India - Ramchandra Guha
MS Dhoni: A quiet radical who did it his way*
Music
Brega: Music and Conflict in Urban Brazil - Samuel M. Araújo
Color, Music and Conflict: A Study of Aggression in Trinidad with Reference to the Role of Traditional Music - J. D. Elder
The 1975 - ‘Notes On a Conditional Form’ review - Dan Stubbs*
Life Without Live - Rob Sheffield*
How Britney Spears Changed Pop - Rob Sheffield
Concert for Bangladesh
From “Help!” to “Helping out a Friend”: Imagining South Asia through the Beatles and the Concert for Bangladesh - Samantha Christiansen
Gender
Clothing Behaviour as Non-verbal Resistance - Diana Crane
The Normalisation of Queer Theory - David M. Halperin
Menstruation and the Holocaust - Jo-Ann Owusu*
Women’s Suffrage the Democratic Peace - Allan Dafoe
Pink and Blue: Coloring Inside the Lines of Gender - Catherine Zuckerman*
Women’s health concerns are dismissed more, studied less - Zoanne Clack
Food
How Food-Obsessed Millennials Shape the Future of Food - Rachel A. Becker (as a non-food obsessed somewhat-millennial, this was interesting)
Colonialism’s effect on how and what we eat - Coral Lee
Tracing Europe’s influence on India’s culinary heritage - Ruth Dsouza Prabhu
Chicken Kiev: the world’s most contested ready-meal*
From Russia with mayo: the story of a Soviet super-salad*
The Politics of Pancakes - Taylor Aucoin*
How Doughnuts Fuelled the American Dream*
Pav from the Nau
A Short History of the Vada Pav - Saira Menezes
Fantasy (mostly just harry potter and lord of the rings)
Purebloods and Mudbloods: Race, Species, and Power (from The Politics of Harry Potter)
Azkaban: Discipline, Punishment, and Human Rights (from The Politics of Harry Potter)*
Good and Evil in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lengendarium - Jyrki Korpua
The Fairy Story: J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis - Colin Duriez (from Tree of Tales)*
Tolkien’s Augustinian Understanding of Good and Evil: Why The Lord of the Rings Is Not Manichean - Ralph Wood (from Tree of Tales)*
Travel
The Hidden Cost of Wildlife Tourism
Chronicles of a Writer’s 1950s Road Trip Across France - Kathleen Phelan
On the Early Women Pioneers of Trail Hiking - Gwenyth Loose
On the Mythologies of the Himalaya Mountains - Ed Douglas*
More random assorted ones
The cosmos from the wheelchair (The Economist obituaries)*
In El Salvador - Joan Didion
Scientists are unravelling the mystery of pain - Yudhijit Banerjee
Notes on Nationalism - George Orwell
Politics and the English Language - George Orwell*
What Do the Humanities Do in a Crisis? - Agnes Callard*
The Politics of Joker - Kyle Smith
Sushant Singh Rajput: The outsider - Uday Bhatia*
Credibility and Mystery - John Berger
happy reading :)
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I am going to keep posting this link (in bio) because these brave women are having hard conversations. The Torah and the Qur'an both command us to "love thy neighbor". My mother and her friends are accomplishing more over zoom than powerful men have ever managed. #peace #sisterhoodofsalaamshalom #hashkivenu (at Chicago, Illinois) https://www.instagram.com/p/CPFEWPeFMvB/?utm_medium=tumblr
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The day is coming when a single carrot, freshly observed, will set off a revolution.
Paul Cézanne (via inthenoosphere)
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Every painting is a visual chronicle of dynamic engagement between its maker and her present reality, fortified with urgency and vitality: "[This] image of the 'here and now' is inherently low-resolution, relative to whatever passes for a perfected standard, the focused high resolution that is gradually acquired and seemingly timeless. A pictorial surface of low resolution corresponds to the transiency of sensory experience [...] The immediacy of a process of painting would return a living quality to a stilled image, a quality of now as opposed to then. Painting induces acts of viewing that animate its imperfect image (pg. 5).
Richard Schiff, "Cézanne Photographic". Nonsite.org (Issue #26: November, 2018). https://nonsite.org/cezanne-photographic/”
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[link in bio] Wrote a little bit about why I love @gapkapaints (with @holbeinartistmaterials and @dayglocolor and @langridgeartistcolours in supporting roles). “I have found that Gapka’s line of traditional neon oil paints is superior to Holbein’s water-soluble offerings for a number of reasons. Gapka paints often feature a loose texture, but their pigments are much more potent than the Holbein pigments. Straight out of the tube, both Holbein and Gapka fluorescents are highly transparent. When mixed with conventional colors, Gapka neons amplified brilliance and elevated the given mixture’s luminosity. One would need to use a greater proportion of a given Holbein paint to achieve the same effect. The transparent quality of both Holbein “luminous” colors and Gapka “Neon” colors requires that they be mixed with a pale, opaque paint to achieve a useful fluorescent hue. Again, Gapka’s Neons far outstripped Holbine’s Luminous colors. When mixed with Utrecht Flemish White or Gamblin Titanium White, The Gapka neon pigments generated an electrifying, brilliant range of hues distinct from even the brightest conventional colors. “ #ArtistBlog #ArtBlog #Neon #ColorTheory https://www.instagram.com/p/CMOXSuSlp5p/?igshid=b6t6lvw9h91y
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Super excited to see “Brittle Anchors” featured in the next issue of @ekphrasismagazine, alongside “Postcards from Camelot”🍾. “Brittle Anchors” 2019, oil and marble dust on un-stretched linen, 15 in. X 10.75 in. #OilPainting #ArtistOfTheDay #PaintAnyway (at Chicago, Illinois) https://www.instagram.com/p/CLqFjYMl9ON/?igshid=1iib9iuoyeogg
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Thank you @laurenanderson_fineart for sharing my paintings on your page, your paintings are the bomb, I admire your careful attention to the visible world, and the unwavering joy at work on those canvases. Day 1 of the 10 day challenge to share my work and the work of another (I’ve decide to shoutout/nominate 10 other female artists) • “Matt and Hunter (at home among the leaves)” 40 in. X 30 in. Oil, marble dust, and medium on canvas 2021 Private collection (@hunteratha1 ) • - feel free to carry on the 10-day challenge if you wish 💜☺️.Today I’m giving a shoutout to Kristin Bell, who has a show coming up at Antler Gallery in Portland. Kristin makes vibrant illustrations featuring diverse plants and animals. Her art practice is driven by her background in marine biology (she has been vital to marine wildlife research efforts in the waters near St. John in the Caribbean), and her compassion for the wild animals who frequent her family's home outside of Portland, Oregon. Check her out on Instagram: @kristin.n.bell Swipe ➡️ to see a couple of her paintings. • #ArtistsSupportingArtists #StudioLife #artistatwork (at Chicago, Illinois) https://www.instagram.com/p/CKPqs-8FbWC/?igshid=gu0vz2awyble
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I am having a #StudioSale in honor of #ArtistSupportPledge! All paintings are priced between $35 -$200 (not including shipping), with 20% of every $1000 earned being paid forward to another artist whose business has been damaged by #COVID19 . More details can be found at: http://www.rachelahavarosenfeld.com/new-page-12 Generosity is contagious, thank you💖. (at Chicago, Illinois) https://www.instagram.com/p/B-gSHihFk9i/?igshid=1c995k59plpgj
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Detail shot of “In Lieu of Testimony: No. 4” 2019, oil and marble dust on panel, 24 in. X 24 in. I was re-photographing this little love (Thank you so much @heather.conover🙌🏼) tonight, when i was reminded of how hard I fought fir all those little forms on the table. The source image for this is 2 in. X 3.5 in., and i just wanted to rip the surface open so that i could finally get a good look at the mess. Painting this passage forced me to embrace ambiguity. On that note, back to the easel. 🥪 #PerceptualPainting #PaintAnyway #Hustle (at Chicago, Illinois) https://www.instagram.com/p/B9Y0dJSlXao/?igshid=f7izkgsltn1q
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Spent last Friday being absolutely stunned at the gallery opening held in honor of the art therapy postgraduate students from @saicarttherapy . Their work was thought provoking, intense, and timely. @block_candice, your work (both in the studio and with your patients) never fails to amaze. Congratulations my love! 😻 (at SAIC Sullivan Galleries) https://www.instagram.com/p/B8QeeSbFvbq/?igshid=86m54h34ntdw
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DO THE READING #3
FEATURED TEXTS: “The Far North Experience” by Rebecca Solnit, “On Reckoning with a Mother’s Relentless Need to Save Everything” by Donna Masini, and “A Burning is Not A Letting Go” by Suzanne Levine and Kristin Prevallet
There is a direct link between excessive accumulation and the human desire to identify with those closest to them. each article named above clearly outlines specific emotional impulses: the desire to accumulate possessions, the desire to dispose of/alter accumulated possessions, and the drive to empathetically connect with absent loved ones.
until the 20th century, most humans were plagued by scarcity. Everything from food to clothing to household goods were difficult to create, and relatively expensive to obtain. But the industrial revolution dramatically increased the average americans’ access to (and appetite for) cheap goods, crowding homes and creating a problem that would have been foreign to our ancestors: hoarding. Donna masini’s article paints a vivid picture of collection of outdated clothing, unused office supplies, and endless household gadgets that confronted her and her father after her mother’s death. Charged with the daunting task of de-cluttering her parents home, she was forced to grapple with her own emotional attachments to the objects that her mother had saved. Masini found that she was reluctant to dispose of things because they seemed to be the safeguards of her memories (she relates them to Tupperware), capable of holding onto the happy moments and keeping them safe. But as she sifted through her parents’ home, she came to the realization that no stockpile of keepsakes had the power to preserve memories. The past, she explains, only exists within her for as long as she is alive to remember it. The objects made her feel as though her loved ones were with her, but her memories were not tethered to them. Without which, they became “just junk (masini, 8).”
She closes the article with the realization that everything that she was holding onto could outlive her only if she wrote it down. Writing allowed donna masini to free herself from the anxiety of impending loss while curating and organizing the past. artist Suzanne Levine found that her own written records, meticulously preserved and archived, were the source of her “dread”. Like masini, Levine explains that memories “are not contained in anything (Levine, 2)”, rather they survive as fragments in the mind, occasionally re-connected by some external inspiration. the urge to hold onto keepsakes is driven by people who mistake documents and artifacts from the past for the past itself. Unlike more tangible aritfacts, levine’s decades-worth of diaries were different, because their words were capable of reviving memories that were better forgotten. The power that donna masini found so invigorating sparked anxiety for Levine. she was torn between a desire to preserve the diaries for posterity, and the conflicting notion that nobody else would care about the trials of her teenage years, and that they were not worth preserving.
Levine chose to confront the opposing urges by taking a radical artistic action. she chose to burn the diaries, taking photographs of the paper as it curls in and eventually fades into ash. the words that survived the flames became erasure poems, fragmented and fragile just like her memories of the years that they chronicled. The transformation freed her from the painful years of her childhood, allowing her to become the sole keeper of her memories.
Both of the above essays speak to the ways that we grapple with the objects that remain from our pasts, and the memories that are associated with them. rebecca solnit’s eloquent definition of empathy speaks to both artists’ need to dispose of the physical remnants. She relates the pursuit of empathetic interaction as navigating a labyrinth in the dark. lacking the ability to see, one must proceed into the unknown darkness with their hands outstretched, using their sense of touch to search for the way forward. This mindset is ripe for creativity because it forces one to act without planning ahead or fully comprehending their actions. Here, ideas can emerge unencumbered by the harshness or rationality. This “slow journey into the unknown and the unknowable (solnit, 4)” forces to embrace an all-encompassing state of confusion. This allows the wanderer to truly hear what surrounds them, to immerse themselves in it. This is the approach neccessary to learn empathy, because to empathize is to identify with a person by imagining their reality as if it were one’s own, by immersing oneself in it.
simply immersing, and hearing is insufficient. “To hear,” solnit explains “is to let the sound wander all the way through the labyrinth go your ear; to listen is to travel the other way to meet it (solnit, 5).” One must actively. engage with the information, reaching out for it, translating it into one’s own inner language so as to truly understand the others the way they understand themselves: through their senses. if we accept solnit’s definition of empathy, this active emotional connection and curiosity, then I wonder how it would feel to search through that metaphorical labyrinth only to find oneself alone. When we personify our heirlooms and keepsakes, we are acting out of desperation to achieve a sense of empathetic intimacy with an absent person. by picking up the things that they interacted with everyday, one can envelop themselves in the ruins left by their absent loved-one. they can smell the soap as they wash the kitchen sink, can wrap themselves in their coats, and go for walks on the same sidewalks. after all of that is gone, they are left to scour the snapshots and the outdated documents for any traces of that unknowable life.
EMPATHY CAN STILL BE FOUND FOR THOSE WHO ARE ABSENT IF ONE DIRECTS THOSE SAME EFFORTS TOWARDS ARTWORKS, LITERATURE, AND FILM. ALL SPEAK TO THE MINUTIAE OF DAILY LIFE, TO THOSE ASPECTS OF INDIVIDUAL EXISTENCE THAT WOULD OTHERWISE BE LOST.
CITATION:
Solnit, Rebecca. “The Far North Experience: In Praise of Darkness (and Light).” Guernica Magazine, June 17, 2013. https://www.guernicamag.com/rebecca-solnit-the-far-north-of-experience.
Masini, Donna. “On Reckoning with a Mother's Relentless Need to Save Everything.” Literary Hub, September 4, 2019. https://lithub.com/on-reckoning-with-a-mothers-relentless-need-to-save-everything/.
Levine, Suzanne, and Kristin Prevallet. “A Burning Is Not Letting Go.” Guernica Magazine, May 9, 2017. https://www.guernicamag.com/kristin-prevallet-a-burning-is-not-a-letting-go/.
MANY THANKS to Literary Hub and Guernica Magazine, for not hiding your deep wells of collective artistic effort behind paywalls.
FEATURED RESOURCE: SPOTIFY
NO REALLY, THIS IS AN ART RESOURCE:
As a painter, my hands and my eyes are constantly occupied while in my studio. This means that I have less time to catch up on media that I would normally read. In the studio, I use Spotify not just to listen to music, but to stay up to date on the news, to learn about intriguing makers and thinkers in the art world, and to become a a more culturally literate human being. I cite this as an art resource specifically because it features a number of really stellar art podcasts that not only inspire me in the studio, but that introduce important ideas that can advance one’s work in significant ways: many introduce listeners to up an coming artists that they might not otherwise have heard of, others give established artists air time to share useful technical knowledge, still more keep listeners up to date on the complex machinations of the art world, allowing listeners to maintain their awareness of our shared professional community.
DON’T BELIEVE ME?
Bad at Sports: Presents more than 700 interviews with the most influential artists, art historians, curators, critics, and teachers. The episodes are often more than an hour long, and are full of smart ideas that can come in handy when writing an artist statement or advancing a studio practice. They are based in Chicago, which means that they spend a lot of time on local happenings.
Check out episode 360 (where the crew interviews the radiant Lucy Lippard).
Savvy Painter Podcast with Antrese Wood: Host Antrese Wood interviews expert painters about every facet of their studio practices. Episodes are released every other Thursday, and explore a range of subjects such as trends in art sales, the future of painting in the digital age, and parenting as an artist. Other artists focus more on the evolving content of their work, or the technical advances in their studios. In addition, listeners can suggest artists, attend workshops, and learn more about painters who rarely catch the attention of larger publications.
My favorite episode: The love of literature & telling stories through art with Susan Lichtman
The Lonely Palette: Tamar Avishai spends each episode with a specific influential artwork. She starts by interviewing museum-visitors as they stand in front of the piece, exposing listeners to fresh ways of understanding their old favorites. Often, she speaks to people with no artistic background. Then, dives into the more academic portion of the show, breaking down the historical, social, and conceptual contexts that make each piece important. This podcast is useful for those artists who wish they had more time to settle down with a thick book, and want to keep their art history muscles flexed.
Start with episode 0: Art! What is it good for?
SOME OTHER ART PODCASTS WORTH EXPLORING:
I Like Your Work
Eyesore
Art Movements (by Hyperallergic)
Deep Color
WORKS IN PROGRESS:
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When the doubt creeps into the studio, I instinctively crack open my books. I found the spark i was chasing on page 64, where the brilliant Gerhard Richter articulates his interpretation of the same paradox that inspired my current project: the reality that the tools that enable us to see almost always divide us from the realities they reveal. Richter wrestled with the same desire for clarity which is easily mistaken for contact. Perplexed by efforts to materially articulate the phenomenological distance, i started taping snapshots to my studio window. Buried in paper scraps, the little photos were virtually obscured by the dreamsicle-colored lamplight that flooded the alley behind them. Muddied by the fluorescent backlighting, the snapshots’ unintelligible appearances finally reflect their anonymous and unknowable status. When directly observed, each image seems like a portal populated by living, breathing people capable of stepping into our space. The illusion had to be disrupted to reveal the insurmountable chasm that always stood between us and the the photographed scenes. So much here to chew on, I’m heading back to my easel. Rant over (for now). “Ado” and the smaller piece are part of a forthcoming body of work that explores the act of excavating such hypnotic artifacts, and their material circumstances as a metaphor for their lost histories and permanent silence. #GerhardRichter #PaintAnyway #PerceptualPainting #ChicagoArtist #ArtTheoryWillSaveYourSoul ✨ (at Chicago, Illinois) https://www.instagram.com/p/B5KAG-TlrWW/?igshid=13w2jncwaddyn
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When the doubt creeps into the studio, I instinctively crack open my books. I found the spark i was chasing on page 64, where the brilliant Gerhard Richter articulates his interpretation of the same paradox that inspired my current project: the reality that the tools that enable us to see almost always divide us from the realities they reveal. Richter wrestled with the same desire for clarity which is easily mistaken for contact. Perplexed by efforts to materially articulate the phenomenological distance, i started taping snapshots to my studio window. Buried in paper scraps, the little photos were virtually obscured by the dreamsicle-colored lamplight that flooded the alley behind them. Muddied by the fluorescent backlighting, the snapshots’ unintelligible appearances finally reflect their anonymous and unknowable status. When directly observed, each image seems like a portal populated by living, breathing people capable of stepping into our space. The illusion had to be disrupted to reveal the insurmountable chasm that always stood between us and the the photographed scenes. So much here to chew on, I’m heading back to my easel. Rant over (for now). “Ado” and the smaller piece are part of a forthcoming body of work that explores the act of excavating such hypnotic artifacts, and their material circumstances as a metaphor for their lost histories and permanent silence. #GerhardRichter #PaintAnyway #PerceptualPainting #ChicagoArtist #ArtTheoryWillSaveYourSoul ✨ (at Chicago, Illinois) https://www.instagram.com/p/B5KAG-TlrWW/?igshid=13w2jncwaddyn
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