The End of Man

The title comes from a phrase in the Baltimore Catechism. I hope that I may be forgiven the use of non-gender neutral language. The phrase suggests something that is regurgitated in the art press every few years. People are always going on about whether or not painting may be dead since photography ended painting's monopoly on the narrative representation of the world. It's not something I'm particularly worried about, but I would like to speak to my motivations for persisting in the discipline of painting.

Even in the 21st Century, painting is still very vibrant and exciting. It stirs the imagination and the soul in a profound way. Oil paint in particular is, I think, a transubstantial substance. It is neither opaque, nor transparent; neither liquid, nor solid. It's soft translucency lends itself to the sculptural, and yet it is flat. Through it's veils a chromatic pentimento remains visible that recalls the barely apparent veins and fascia seen through flesh. Paint can be shaped and formed into an image, or manipulated with no referent other than its own color, volume, and texture. It exists on the palate in a neutral state, waiting to be formed, but it's color and physicality is suggestive of that transformation. Paint is actual and potential being. More to the point, it is both subject and substance. It is always both. Even on the canvas, after the painting is finished, it remains minerals and oil locked in a physical bond that oxygen will transform over days, years, and decades into a tight matrix. But it is also a person, a landscape, a still life. 

Moving in the other direction, even when it is on the palette, it is more than it seems. When it is an array of globs of ochre, cobalt, ferriammonium ferrocyanide, and cadmium, even as I pick up my brush and agitate it across the canvas, it is becoming something else. Ontologically, paint is difficult to pin down. I think that it is for this reason that painting will always draw it's adherents on. Certainly it is why I paint.

The images below speak to this point. They're all detail shots. There's little difference between a Pollock and a Rembrandt when you really get down to it. Both were smearing a splattering a viscous substance over a textured ground.

Neither are Anuskiewicz and Ghirlandaio very far apart in their technique. Notice the raking of the reds and greens, varied in density to create volume.

The best scholars and historians of art understand that paint is both subject and substance. Robert Hughes and James Elkins are a joy to read because of this. Laura Siedel and Erwin Panofsky actually have a lot in common in their readings of The Arnolfini Portrait. Both miss painting (the verb, not the noun). There's nothing more boring to read than an account of art that only accounts for the subject or its interpretation. As if the beauty of a Monet could be described in terms of haystacks and aquatic flora. There's much more to his paintings than that. It would be akin to saying religion consists solely of morality and rules for clean living. To say such things is to miss the deep needs and aspirations in which we all participate. That is to say, the end of man.