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Like a poem, a painting is a festival, a holiday. A painting is a pause that celebrates or makes a place for Remembrance. Memory in itself cannot be transforming or transfiguring. The act of poetic alchemy changes one thing - the real experience - into another thing, a new or unknown thing. It is the imagination that acts as the director of this Ceremony of Remembrance: Taking memory and playfully, intimately pushing it and kneading it into a new becoming. Therefore entering the world of things as yet unseen; the word as yet un-enunciated; the emotion still barely perceived.
The apparent dislocation of the end image is the locus of that hidden pattern. A disguise for the dance of the real and the imagined, gathered together to step out of the sayable into the unsayable zone of experience; transfiguring expectation of place and people. For me that is how painting proceeds: slow, doubtful, strange to the mind's eye, and ever dictatorial in its demands that I remain alert to the sudden, and the not yet known.
It is slow and not always prolific. But it is the only one worth my efforts. Concepts outside of the furtive, though blind process of submitting to the disillusion of 'failure', - which painting demands of one, - are irrelevant, and a waste of time. To recall a single phrase from a poem requires no concept, not even the antiquated principles of learning by rote. It is the repetition and the journey of word-to-image-to-emotion that allows for the poetic phrase to be imbedded on one's tongue; the poetic reality of those few words then take command as axis of comparison or standardization, that is set against everything experienced as "the real".
