What where why and how is painting? I do not know. So I have turned to slow painting.
When my relation to the outside world shut down during the pandemic, things inside my mind developed into a kind of peephole. A peephole of focused vision that opens to tiny marvels of the world.
This acute awareness of inward focus, born from the pandemic, was coupled with a desire to be with something, someone, anything outside myself. Such a strong longing. It became a call that elicited a tragic outcome: no response. Yet this birdsong in my heart kept trying for response. Calling calling calling. During many of our sessions, my therapist kept asking, “What do you want your art to do?” “Connect me.” I say.
With an obsessed passion I dove into mixing paints with mediums, picking up a selected brush, dipping it on the palette, touching it to the canvas and moving the paint around. Didn’t want to think much about it. I did not want to care for what might be outside of it, its context, but only care deeply about what’s inside of it. Tossing out the context makes every moment brilliant. Like getting a guru’s mindfulness coaching.
It doesn’t matter, and it does matter. Every day in the life of a slow painting can be reworked. In a small way. Or in a big way. Such a wonderful world! Give it a life and if it fizzles, there is always the big garbage can in the studio.
Slow painting leads me to doubt everything I have ever believed about art for the past 40 years.
The doubt does not feel like taking away. It is an addition. A welcome opening.
Written on July 17, 2022. image: detail, bird, 2022. Sandra Meigs