Whatever works is fine with me. But I think a piece is finished when the next mark would be arbitrary. I don't put a piece against the wall, so to speak, but keep at it until I reach that point where only the arbitrary seems possible. Then I move on to the next work. I can't go back and get into the evolution of a work after a longish break. The encounter is what it is and one just sees it through. Get it done, get it done, get it done. I like to get things finished, and the sooner the better. A painting has a life, as it's been said, and one can't just put it on hold but must live it through, for better or worse, a whole life brought to the point of self perpetuation. Stuart Davis once said that he's like to go to his studio in the morning to see if his painting (in process) was "still breathing". wc
________________________________ From: Michael Brady <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Saturday, June 6, 2009 8:13:17 PM Subject:Re: http://www.royboydgallery.com/Conger/Conger.htm On Jun 6, 2009, at 8:47 PM, William Conger wrote: > If I understand you correctly, I agree. But it's so hard to know when one > confronts the inevitable and resolved because it's always caught up in the > transient stream of events. And my own efforts to attain the elusive > permanence are contrasted by the evolving glut of popular culture which > relishes the now, the dissolution of events, "cutting edge", and the "point > of the avant-garde" It's been a difficult chore to live in an age that > worships the transient but then maybe the antagonism it nurtures is good. "Inevitable and resolved" implies completion and coherence, fittedness, proportion, all those things. (Yes, Cheerskep, that last phrase is very vague, indeed. And it has a certain Thomistic ring to it, too!) It's my experience, and I suspect yours too, that I reach a point where I can't continue, and as I look around at a piece and examine it, very little beckons me to continue. Nothing, in fact. Sometimes, I know in that moment that it is finished, and well made, too; other times, I have doubts about it and think it's just stopped but not finished. Yet when I return to it after a long break, I still can't go any further and even begin to believe that it is completed, and pretty good, to boot. There are a few miscreants leaning against the walls, never to be taken out in public, poor products that exhibit many false efforts, fruitless tactics, incoherence. I believe instinct honed over the years by experience can tell us when the stopping point, the completion, is reached. And, like "style," the instinct is personal, individual, very often correct, and very often yields a good judgment of the work's quality. Transience and speed are for the young. They have to run fast, knock down the old predecessors in their way, claim their spots, and woo a stranger or two in the process. We've been in a perpetual state of avant-gardery probably since the 20s or 32s, and surely since the 50s. Cutting-edgism is de rigeur. "But what have you done lately?" is the sentry's challenge. But the pop culture version of the avant garde can't last longer than someone's memory, after which it becomes tradition, and within two decades is revived as "appropriating the past" or some such tactic. But the AG always did that, at least since its first appearance in the form of the Impressionists (or Courbet, whoever you peg as the progenitor of it all). | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Michael Brady [email protected]
