Painting Film (1996)

Abstract

If it be an art, then it is intrinsically aesthetic, requiring aesthete-- that is to say, it is beautiful, integrally balanced, and (as unique) of some individually discovered integrity: its appreciator is one who is capable of sensory justice and evolutionary thought, free from dogma and representational bias, because art work's this-for-that is not clock-like but rather evolves eccentrically within, and only within, limits of being Human. Art forms and colors, or rhythms and tones of words, progress asymmetrically or eventually settle into some complexity of beseeming haphazard composure. The art work defines a paradigm of experienced chaos of everyday life while being in itself a construct quite distinct from it. The salad is on every ruffled edge of crisp with glitter of its own being-at-one with water and/or overlay of oil. Musically, such crispness can translate pizzicatto, or into some slow uncoil of overall (say oboe) curl of tone, some tone of green punctuated by drum, and so on, or it can just be distorted by dream-the limp-lettuce nightmare, crack and timbre reverberation in phosphor glint of cathected leafage, soforth. Were I to paint plein-aire abstraction of this (as I do) onto a strip of film, my whim would be to absorb what could be seen of such lettuce, its surrounds of table and all, very room, and then to allow into my consideration movements of such absorption-- shifts of eye in contemplation, electrical discharges of synaptic thought, translations as it were, from optic imprint to memorabilia. For color (magic markers, dyes, india inks) I choose greens, yes, but vein them with yellows and ruffled shadow-black, applying isopropyl alcohol on a twisted pointed Kleenex to thin dye lines, smudge tones or (with alcohol flicked from a thumbed toothbrush) create circles to dab into partial-circle-curves or (with weakened, spit-diluted alcohol) do manage filigrees midst mixes of conglomerate color. Sometimes varieties of tone are marked directly upon transparent palette (or clipboard which holds film-strip), so that I can then make toned puddles of alcohol to dip film into, feathering shapes with quick twists of wrist, pressing film so that dyes collect as edges to half-dried shapes, and so on. More often than not alcohol is used to erase an entire frame or collection of frames which have, so it seems, come to naught. There is very little of lettuce left after all this, but when successful, truths of moving visual thinking are made manifest along a strip of film. As to table, strips of adhesive tape provide varieties of straight lines, after applied dyes, in mimic of eye's slippage-brevities ofcubism if you will, in Time..continuities of cubistic envisionment when flashed (twenty-four frames a second) through projector and upon motion-picture screen. Very little of geometry survives translation into organic thought, so it seems to me. The meat of mind (at least my mind) puts curve to linearity, blurs hard-edge perception; but thought of (for example) the shortest distance between two points prevails in a mix of cellular irregularities sufficient to necessitate its occasional representation. The table is in range of nomenclature brown; but eye's retention of yellow is blue, and after-image of brown is often something I call red-black-a very muted red, to be sure...more in range of purple, say-actually unnameable. The shifts of tone, as mind absorbs, is understandably variable along a strip of film, but almost always tending to recycle its orders, like pitches of a tune, but a tune undergoing melodic variations. These variations are subject to interruptions by absorption of all other tones (and shape shifts) of surrounding room (for shape does surely affect reception of tone...and tone of tone in color-chordal variance) The plate upon which salad sits (oval-shaped, as it happens) presents curves which tighten in relation to each other as if pulled string-to-bow, becoming variances of interruptive horizontals,verticals diagonals (as we name them-mimicking language of painting and still photography) in field of compositional logic for film. …