Paint from Here to There

paint Somehow the paint has to get from here, the palette, to there, the canvas.  Painting is my act of moving and sculpting this beautiful and sensual medium of colored pigments and linseed oil with a brush or a palette knife. Thousands of paint strokes are physical and gestural acts all motored by my emotion. In other words, if I where to dully lay down a line of paint with blank emotion the line would read as dull. But when I feel the line, the line reads as if it has feeling, energy.  This is the energy that the viewer is responding to, not the medium, not the paint. Like a dance step, one could go simply demonstrate the motions of a step.  But the heart centered dance step, that’s what we all want to watch. When I look at my palette and think of how much movement of my hands is involved, I’m reminded of how ancient my trade of painting is. I’ve chosen a very rare hand crafted trade in stark digital age.  I can’t help but to think of the history and tradition of painting. Before paints were placed in portable tubes that could be carried out into the landscape artists were cloistered in their studios. And before an artist had an opportunity to pick up the paintbrush they had to train under a painters' guild and learn how to mix the pigments and linseed oil into paint. The paints I use date back to the golden age of the Dutch masters in 1664.  In fact the formulation of the pigments haven’t changed since Vincent Van Gogh used the very same paints, the same formulation. Irritated art museum guards have asked me to step back from Van Gogh’s paintings a number of times.  But I just want to see how he got it from here to there.
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