Instead of focusing on my painting as being something limited and constrained, even though it has arisen out of limitation and constraint, I have focused instead on the potential it represents. This begins with the blank white surface, a situation I have come to see in terms of the painting’s Negative Capability – the notion coined by the poet Keats which also has application beyond the poetry world.
I understand the process of doing the painting as being one of a mutual self-actualisation going on between it and myself, formed as it is out of a dialogue between us.
My task as the creator of the painting is to make it be all that it can be, transferring myself to it in the process. The subject matter of the painting is the thought of the painting itself rather than any other object of my mind.
Having an object in mind alters the parameters of the painting. Without an object in mind, I can more freely cultivate the pictorial field, and the painting is freer to become its real self, come into being more fully, as if “alive”. I think in terms of a balancing act of feedback loops, of setting up a homeostatic dynamic, as a way of articulating the painting in terms of its pictorial elements.
Pictopoiesis is about the impossibility of translating the painting into a language other than its own but as the painter of these paintings, I feel compelled to explicate pictopoiesis if I possibly can because maybe that could eventually lead to new insight into the process of thought itself, which the paintings are a rendition of.
The timeline, so far, of the current painting (oil on aluminium 125 x 127 cm) is shown below, I would say it is about midway towards its completion:
