I often find that simple reflective thoughts from magnificent painters can profoundly affect my understanding of painting - what the heck am I actually doing when I'm painting?
I was flipping through a monograph of Antonio Lopez Garcia the other day, and a brief explanation on one of his landscape paintings mentioned how Garcia saw his landscape painting as an accumulation of numerous "present moments." It is an incredibly beautiful idea with such an acute observation on the essence of his actions. A painting that is not a frozen moment of reality but a landscape of time!
Garcia is talking about how a landscape painting that takes two years to make contains the passage of time simply because different observations and applications of paint are made at different times - when a part of the image was materialized two years ago, and another just yesterday. The two years the painting takes magnifies this fact. Of course, the idea of painting time can hardly be seen as new. Duchamp's Nudes Descending the Staircase already presented sequential motions in a painting in the tens. But I propose to stretch Garcia's idea to include a less overt understanding and perception on the depiction of time - that all painters are essentially painting time as they put down paints successively onto the support.
Viewers often subconsciously perceive a painting to be a representation of a single moment in time; abstract or not, it is a window into a scene, a whole representation of a concept, simply because we can see the entire image at once - we are not waiting for the preceding image to pass or expecting it to be replaced by a successive image, as we do in video and film. Maybe we are conditioned by photographs and films, wherein the sense of time is created through a series of "stills," and are forgetting that perhaps we should view a painting with the understanding that, unlike photographs, there exists a very first stroke of paint - the oldest stroke on the painting. However, different techniques may pronounce or obscure this sequential sense of paint applications.
Some painters strive to erase the track of time left by painting processes, laboring to create an opaque, seamless, and uniform surface that appears as though it has been, impressively and impossibly, materialized everywhere at once on the canvas. This tendency is exemplified by many painters of the 19th century L'Ecole des Beaux-Arts tradition such as Ingres and Bouguereau, and it is still an important component in paintings to many artists today, like the photorealist painters.
Others, either consciously or subconsciously, utilize and even enhance this temporal quality of painting application, often extensively using apparent overlapping of opaque paints and layering of transparent paints. There are innumerable painters who exhibit this sequential quality in their works all through history, some of the most obvious examples are from various modernist movements such as abstract expressionism, wherein the successions of paint applications are often preserved and exhibited deliberately.
I was flipping through a monograph of Antonio Lopez Garcia the other day, and a brief explanation on one of his landscape paintings mentioned how Garcia saw his landscape painting as an accumulation of numerous "present moments." It is an incredibly beautiful idea with such an acute observation on the essence of his actions. A painting that is not a frozen moment of reality but a landscape of time!
Garcia is talking about how a landscape painting that takes two years to make contains the passage of time simply because different observations and applications of paint are made at different times - when a part of the image was materialized two years ago, and another just yesterday. The two years the painting takes magnifies this fact. Of course, the idea of painting time can hardly be seen as new. Duchamp's Nudes Descending the Staircase already presented sequential motions in a painting in the tens. But I propose to stretch Garcia's idea to include a less overt understanding and perception on the depiction of time - that all painters are essentially painting time as they put down paints successively onto the support.
Viewers often subconsciously perceive a painting to be a representation of a single moment in time; abstract or not, it is a window into a scene, a whole representation of a concept, simply because we can see the entire image at once - we are not waiting for the preceding image to pass or expecting it to be replaced by a successive image, as we do in video and film. Maybe we are conditioned by photographs and films, wherein the sense of time is created through a series of "stills," and are forgetting that perhaps we should view a painting with the understanding that, unlike photographs, there exists a very first stroke of paint - the oldest stroke on the painting. However, different techniques may pronounce or obscure this sequential sense of paint applications.
Some painters strive to erase the track of time left by painting processes, laboring to create an opaque, seamless, and uniform surface that appears as though it has been, impressively and impossibly, materialized everywhere at once on the canvas. This tendency is exemplified by many painters of the 19th century L'Ecole des Beaux-Arts tradition such as Ingres and Bouguereau, and it is still an important component in paintings to many artists today, like the photorealist painters.
Others, either consciously or subconsciously, utilize and even enhance this temporal quality of painting application, often extensively using apparent overlapping of opaque paints and layering of transparent paints. There are innumerable painters who exhibit this sequential quality in their works all through history, some of the most obvious examples are from various modernist movements such as abstract expressionism, wherein the successions of paint applications are often preserved and exhibited deliberately.
