Time Patterns– At West End Gallery
I can hardly understand the importance given to the word research in connection with modern painting. In my opinion to search means nothing in painting. To find is the thing. Nobody is interested in following a man who, with his eyes fixed on the ground, spends his life looking for the purse that fortune should put in his path. The one who finds something no matter what it might be, even if his intention were not to search for it, at least arouses our curiosity, if not our admiration.
—Pablo Picasso, “Picasso Speaks,” 1923
To find is the thing…
I often write here about searching for something with my work. It’s usually something I can’t describe in any way that helps myself or the reader. It’s just something that pulls me forward.
Well, that’s what I thought, for the most part.
Reading the passage above from Picasso recently set me thinking that perhaps it was not a search at all, at least not in the way I had portrayed it.
Perhaps I was driven onward because I had found something and felt the need to express and share it. Or perhaps to keep that feeling of discovery, that eureka! moment, alive within myself– and within others who sensed whatever I had found for themselves when they viewed the work.
I can’t say for sure. I am still wrangling with this. But it makes some sense to me. A painting begins as an exploration, a search, but as it progresses it moves toward a revelation of some sort. The search is in the process, not in the resulting work.
At least, for the artist. It may differ for the viewer. They may see it as a way toward something they need and seek. Something they may not even realize is needed or sought. Perhaps they will find that same thing in the final work that that I had found, that same thing that seems to somehow answer vague, unasked questions.
Who knows for sure? But this idea that the work in not so much a search as it is a revealing of what has been found satisfies something in me.
Maybe that what was I was looking for in the first place?
Or maybe this is all one of those dreams where everything you wonder about suddenly seems to make perfect sense and there is that momentary feeling of elation that is then suddenly and completely gone once your eyes open.
Could it be that?
I don’t know but here’s an old song from Todd Rundgren that came to mind while I was finishing up. I haven’t heard this tune in many years and Todd Rundgren is one of those artists who was very popular in the 70’s but has faded somewhat from the front of the public mind the in the decades that followed, though he still is actively recording and performing. Just on a smaller stage as the musical outlets became narrower and more niched. This is I Saw the Light.
Redtree Times 
“I Saw the Light” always evokes quite a different song for me, and I assumed Rundgren’s was a different version of that song. Nope! What’s funny is that I recognized his song immediately, but didn’t know its title.
This caught my attention: “A painting begins as an exploration, a search, but as it progresses it moves toward a revelation of some sort. The search is in the process, not in the resulting work.” Annie Dillard had an interesting take on the same point. When I find it, I’ll bring it back here.
I’m much the same about the title of this song. Though I know this song well, my mind still immediately goes to Hank Williams when I hear that title.
I found the Dillard. It’s in her book The Writing Life. I found a link that includes the opening passage, and some others. In places, all it takes is substituting ‘painter’ for ‘writer’ for the relevance to your work to come clear, although she makes an interesting distinction between the methods of the two.
Well into the book I found other great passages:
“The writer [or painter] knows his field–what has been done, what could be done, the limits — the way a tennis player knows the court. And like that expert, he plays the edges. That is where the exhilaration lies…”
“…In working-class France, when an apprentice got hurt, or when he got tired, the experienced workers said, ‘It is the trade entering his body.’ The art must enter the body, too. A painter cannot use paint like glue or screws to fasten down the world. The tubes of paint are like fingers; they work only if, inside the painter, the neural pathways are wide and clear to the brain… You adapt yourself, Paul Klee said, to the contents of the paintbox.”
It’s such a great book.