When I visited the Metropolitan Museum years ago I was fascinated by the suits of armour from around the world. The Japanese ones caught my eye because of their extreme, almost manic detailing, as if it was a compulsion or even a prayer, but they also had a certain primitivity. No idea if this has anything to do with my ethnic origins.
I miss the skyscrapers. The endless expanses certainly have an effect. But a bigger impact is made by the museums that represent a core of extreme energies.
Unsolved problems are the starting point. Not being sure you will ever solve them is what keeps you going..
You’re exhausted, or you’re relieved by an illusion. Next day you may end up starting again from scratch.
I think that a "middle area" can only exist as fiction. A polar situation like light/shade, black/white, present/history has always been a tool in discourse. The idea is to stimulate the public’s imagination and to throw out an anchor. This is a tradition and I’m a "traditional" painter, without belonging to the "trade".
Interestingly, Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus from Dresden accompanied by thinking about landscape for a while. The way the picture is built is highly conceptual. The fields extending into the distance are surfaces like Venus’s body. The painter piled them up as something other than what they portray. In the face of such radicality, Venus just fades away. I think it was then that I began to realize how much can be made out of “figure in a landscape”.
At present, I can really use “essential components” in the sense of Leonardo’s “Vitruvian Man”. My human figures are also colourful, their movements often remain unexplainable, but they are easy to shape, should I wish to do so.
Degas always makes me chuckle. In his work, there’s always something slightly amiss spatially. Whether I take an early painting like “Semiramis Building Babylon” or his later bathers and ballerinas, the ground at the feet of the viewer, or the painter, falls away radically, as if the viewer were standing in the picture with a camera on a tripod with a wide-angle lens. A similarly peculiar sense of space can be found in the work of his contemporaries like Munch, Lautrec and Caillebotte. Although these works coincide with the spread of mobile cameras that required a tripod, with Degas there is an extra something, and it’s strong. It’s like the painter’s smell. And the viewer is of course the thing on which the existence of painting most depends.
This question makes me feel almost like a Constructivist. I experience painting as hard work. Why should the viewer have an easier life?
