September 21, 2014
Some artwork from quite a while ago that I am debating about painting over…
Just finished reading Leonard Cohen’s first novel, “The Favourite Game” and I really enjoyed it. Especially the passage below. And if you really want to know what puking has to do with school supplies, well, it’s not that long of a book.
“Puking clears the soul. Breavman remembered what he felt like. Fry’s Stationery, buying school supplies. Ten years old. The whole new school year coiled like a dragon to be conquered by sharp yellow Eagle pencils. Fresh erasers, rows of them, crying to be sacrificed for purity and stars for Neatness. The stacks of exercise books dazzlingly empty of mistakes, more perfect than Perfect. Unblunted compasses, lethal, containing millions of circles, too sharp and substantial for the cardboard box that contained them. Grown-up ink, black triumphs, eradicable mistakes. Leather bags for the dedicated trek from home to class, arms free for snowball or chestnut attacks. Paper clips surprisingly heavy in their small box, rulers with markings as complicated and important as a Spitfire’s dashboard, sticky red-bordered labels to fasten your name to anything. All tools benign, unused. Nothing yet an accomplice to failure.”
susanne semchuk 
If this is your artwork – please do not paint over them! These are wondrous images: Interesting, vivid and movingly creative…
AnnMarie 🙂
LikeLike
Thank you – it is my artwork – but from quite some time ago.
LikeLike
Ah, I have many of those and they’re definitely worth saving. The 2 pieces on your blog – I hope you think about giving a reprieve, they’re wonderful…
But alas, every creative soul must move as the must 🙂
AnnMarie 🙂
Happy Tuesday
LikeLike
It’s a bit of a tricky thing though… I try to focus on just doing as much painting as I can, to just keep moving from one thing to the next in the pockets of time I carve out without getting paralyzed by preciousness. (Something I seem susceptible to) And eventually there is all this art and so little space and something has to give. By taking photos I figure that if nothing more, each piece that ends up recycled at least has been recorded and will continue to exist in a small digital corner of the universe (or my external hard drive). And of course there’s the art historian in me that thinks of how interesting it is to continually layer new paintings over old, like the layers of a tree and to think of how appropriate it is to build on past experience literally, on one canvas, over and over until the surface is so textured that it can’t NOT be evident in whatever comes next….
Happy Tuesday to you as well AnnMarie and thank you for your kind words.
LikeLike
Wow – that is the most reasonable statement for a paint-over I’ve ever read 🙂
Good luck with whatever you decide to do with your your works – past, present and future
AnnMarie 🙂
Midway through the week – geez, time disappears faster than anything else – I’d like to keep time from changing too 😉
LikeLiked by 1 person