Some Recent Non-Paintings

They aren't bad they just aren't paintings

“What did you mean when you said you’ve never actually painted a painting?”

When I had admitted this failing to this friend of mine some weeks earlier I had known at the time that saying the sentence out loud was a sort of transgression. I had broken a deal with myself. I didn’t know how to put into words what I meant by this — I hadn't ever even thought it in the direction of another mind. It was a private castigation, one of the absolutely true criticisms that I wrap around my own neck with brisk self assurance. I know that I am right about this and I know what I mean by it — a least I can gesture towards what I mean. If I really did understand what the failing was with specificity maybe it could be overcome. Or maybe I will only understand it after it has been overcome. I hope very much that some day I will fall into a swoop of feeling and intention while painting that will yield A Painting and after that fall paintings are all tat I will paint henceforth. Some of them will be bad paintings insofar as they do not succeed on their own terms, but they will still be Paintings, they will bristle with genuine, coherent, and totalizing feeling and be undergirded by a single intelligence and most of all they will be the product of an artist who understands what she is doing when she is painting a painting. Intention! I have it now only in a limited sense — I am painting a person, I am capturing this mood, I am rendering the gentle curve of her hip — but I am not painting a painting.

I know that I have never painted a painting because I know that I have written essays and — just the once but nonetheless — a book. I know what it feels like for the entire organism of the written work to develop the hands and feet and heart beat that it requires to breathe on its own. I know while I am writing that the creature flowing out of me will not require mouth to mouth when I am through with configuration. I feel the contours of the creature coming into shape. Feel. Yes. It is an intellectual activity and I feel it with my mind not with my heart but feeling is the correct word.

Here are a few recent, decent non-paintings: