Holy Smoke

Painting is alchemy. Or, at least, it should be.
The grinding of pigments into a paste and the smearing and wiping and removing, eventually forms the careful layering of color into lines and shapes.
All in order to see more fully?

All the processes of adding and subtracting paint usher into being a new something.
This something will either become present as a new visible or merge back into the underlying structures of reality, another attempt of making “sense” make sense.

Every recognizable shape reveals its twin that grows incoherently beside it.
They necessitate each other and form a harmony of knowing and unknowing.
The narratives we seem to recognize and infuse the painting with are even more ephemeral. Like smoke or steam, we have a sense of them only as they dissolve and dissipate.

We have no way to grasp them outside of their disappearance.
These days, presence is encountered only in its becoming absent.
We think and feel in lacks.
Every day another story goes up in smoke. There isn’t even dust to settle.
All we have now is the smearing and re-texturing of what we once could make out as a picture of the world and of ourselves.

As people who were once tied to stories, we are now barely tied to the bones that used to tell them.

Painting (as all art) is the act of gathering smoke into shape, making sustainable the volatile, and ultimately refusing to utter the words “the end”.