The art of writing about art

I have been practicing writing about my paintings. Some people are visually sensitive by nature. Others need a little help understanding visual things. So, writing about the paintings is meant to help the less visual person acquire a more nuanced understanding of the purely visual aspect of a painting. The difficulty that some people have with paintings arises from a certain reluctance to give themselves over to the pure enjoyment of a visual spectacle. As a species, we tend to trust words over and above images.

Any number of things are beautiful. (I will leave it a tacit argument for the present that most great art is in some manner fundamentally beautiful, whatever else it might be.) Almost anybody will tell you that a sunset is beautiful, though how many people will go out of their way to observe the sunset? How many people would schedule their hours so that they could be outdoors when sunset occurs? Or finding themselves in front of a beautiful sunset, how many people will stand and gaze at the changing colors, the effects of light and dark that tinges the entire landscape? How many will watch the light until it departs and revell in the glory of the spectacle? And a sunset is after all reality.

A painting is a simulacrum. Oddly people will sometimes spend more time gazing at and studying a painting than they would spend studying the reality. (This, of course, is not something that an artist complains about.) When people study paintings in that scrutinizing way, they are sometimes trying to figure out how it is done -- how it is possible that the image looks so "real"? This response equates painting almost with magic. (Again, the artist profits by such interest so we won't complain.)

But the element of the painting that most deserves our continued attention is not the mechanics of it, but its beauty -- the grace, the rightness of colors, the fineness of effects, the harmony of the whole. All these things will bring along with them meanings, thoughts, memories, insights, feelings. All these things are fine qualities to linger over also.

A really great painting helps reveals parts of ourselves to us. It enlarges our world.

It's things like this that I try to write about with regard to my own painting. I do so in part to help the audience see the picture better. But I also do it to help me see my own picture better. Sometimes I learn things that help me continue deeper into the picture. It's then that writing becomes a form of visual invention.