A few musings on the amazingly counter entropic gesture of pulling something into existence from what appears to be nothing…
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I have trusted to my intuition to find the subjects, and I have written intuitively. I have an idea when I start, I have a shape; but I will fully understand what I have written only after some years.
–V. S. Naipaul
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Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order.
–Virginia Woolf
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All perceiving is also thinking, all reasoning is also intuition, all observation is also invention.
–Rudolf Arnheim
Nietzsche said: You must have chaos within you, in order to give birth to a dancing star.
Truly amazing to see your paintings juxtaposed with the Hubble images and to read about your pull towards gestating images months before they are “born” in your work. At first your description of your process sounded like a conversation between you and the images appearing on your canvases, but what you describe goes so much deeper into an interplay with your own subconscious, a conversation going on deep beneath the surface of your awareness long before anything appears in paint. Fascinating. And then, of course, the Nailpaul quote, suggestive of meaning still being born long after the painting appears on the canvas as well.
Sally, I love that quote. Nietzsche, always the anguished poet.
QS, It is a phenomenon of a very personal nature, and one that I questioned sharing. In the end I decided to open it up to others, primarily to gain some context and meaning from others. Thank you for your response.