O images, dear enfant, images . . .
Never let those scales drop from your eyes
James Merrill, The Changing Light at Sandover
I think that artists work to see what it is that they'll make.
No one knows what makes good art; it's always a surprise when it appears. The images that we make jostle against all of the other images; you have to like a crowd.
Art is imagination in a crowd. There's an inherent optimism to it. It resonates within the vibrant world.
The art I love the most has a defenselessness about it, like a body.
Ad Reinhardt must have said it somewhere: Art is not life, and life is not art. Philip Guston said We are image-makers and image-ridden. Yvonne Rainer said Feelings are facts; and Artaud said There is a mind in the flesh, and Mind belongs to matter. Painting is a kind of living in images: thinking in images, practicing imagination.
Images are facts, feelings, signs, symbols, signifiers, referents, reflections, echoes, gestures and emotions made manifest, mimetic language, clues, pointers, metaphors. All marks are images, and no image is pure, least of all an abstract image. Yet every image is abstract, muddled with meanings intended and unintended.
An image, in its simplest form, is visceral, kinetic thought.
Painting is thought made physical . All thoughts are permitted.