Contain yourself
Steven Soderbergh once said, “I’m after a sort of discovered precision. I want the construction of something that’s been considered, but I want it to feel like it’s happening right in front of me for the first time.” This makes so much sense to me.
All of my paintings involve iterating toward a mathematical ideal, fully balanced, configured for optimal efficiency, water flowing to its lowest point. What’s interesting though is how it doesn’t ever fully get there. It would be easier with a Spirograph, or with Adobe tools, or by swinging a paint bucket on a rope. But those results are static and forgettable, bloodless. And more importantly, doing it that way doesn’t result in the same type of direct changes to my brain or actively evolve my faculties of perception.
I paint very selfishly, valuing the painting act over the painting object. At the same time, the handmade painted object vibrates with how it isn’t quite at full rest, having failed to expel all of its latent tension, expectation, energy. Each layer is closer, but the thing about the perfect is that it can, by definition, no longer entertain the possibility of further change. Who wants that? Why is that an end state to which we should aspire?