Post 35: Writing about painting can't be done / writing about some paintings in Wet Diagram

It’s interesting that writing about painting sets up a relationship between writing and painting. That to write about a painting is to connect this verb (writing) with this object of the preposition (painting). If writing and painting are two separate domains (are they? aren’t they?), then to write about painting is to draw a line from one domain to the other. Like this:

At least, that’s what writing feels like. Line drawing. Though, what does a line mean?

As this diagram shows, writing about painting (if that was the title of the diagram) situates painting in space. Writing grounds painting--creates what seems to be an accessible path to it--by putting it in connection to another thing (in this case, to itself: to words).

There’s a trickiness here--to the pursuit of writing about painting--because in this diagram, in this conception I have of the project that is writing about painting, writing is both the thing painting is in relationship to, and the act that creates the relationship in itself. It feels like this:

There are so many questions here: What is the line? Why does the act of writing draw this line? And, ultimately, what feels wrong about it to me?

I recognize that the line is, too, the word “about.” So the diagram also looks like this:

Is there a different word you could put between “writing” and “painting” that wouldn’t draw this line?

I think it’s at least partly the explicitness of language that does the work of line-drawing. With words being concrete and identifiable enough to be made out of lines themselves, it only makes sense that the grand total of a set of words would create a clear, discrete line. 

The ultimate problem I have is that writing about painting gives off the impression that paintings can be written about, when I don’t think they can be. And I find the obstacle to be in the nature of this relationship that gets set up, the connecting line. Somehow, if writing could talk about painting without being in relation to it, without going right up to it and making contact with its point in space, and therefore beginning to intrude on it--in other words, without drawing a line--that might feel more right. Where can writing about painting go if it tries not to lead in the direction of the paintings it writes about? Would this be the same as writing about painting in a way that acknowledges the blind spots in doing so? To write and not aim toward sufficiency? But what does any of this practically look like?

Even more so: What is the impulse to write (or outcome of writing) in a lane I have deemed unwritable?

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I’m thinking about these questions with the work in Wet Diagram--a show of paintings by Helen Shu, Jonah Parker, and Rosa Bozhkov at CT State Gateway Gallery in New Haven.

Where do these paintings sit in relation to the possibility of their being written about? Or, the idea that they can’t be written about? And what of the fact that I think they can't be written about, and yet am still going to write some things about them right now?

It’s nice to think of the show’s title as an invitation to imagine adding the quality of wetness to the “writing → painting” diagram I included earlier. How does inserting the idea of wetness allow the diagram to change? Also, what to make of the fact that the diagram as I construed it was dry?

As a whole, to sum everything up as though it is one thing, the paintings in Wet Diagram feel slow, almost slo-mo, which is funny because some of them seem like they would actually have the presence of being fast.

For instance: Why does this painting look fast but feel slow?

An answer I have: There’s something about thinking of this painting being made that makes me feel that it moved slowly into its current, final form, Though, the viewing experience of this final form that feels so whole and unbreakable is what adds a fastness. As in, it’s difficult to imagine the painting in earlier, less finished stages, in any other stage than what it's at now, making it feel as though you were once looking at its bare canvas, then you turned your head away, and when you then turned back, suddenly this whole painting in its entirety was here. This is the speed. The speed of one thing moving, rather than a number of things moving.

Thinking of the paintings of each painter in the show related to the two others, I landed on this schema that Jonah’s paintings are (or “feel like”?) beginnings, Helen’s are middles, and Rosa’s are ends.

Beginnings:

The beginning paintings seem to have originated from a point in space. From a place where meaning is compressed--like the black dot on my earlier diagram that represents the whole category of painting. As that condensed point begins to open up and share itself, the painted shapes--unobtrusive, but irregular and wobbly--sit on and hold to the edges of their substrates (the actual edges of the paintings). I feel like the sun comes up on these shapes and reveals them in the positions they've been holding all night. They were waiting, floaty, floggy, but now they’ve awoken. Sometimes the forms look stuck to an edge, but other times they’re actively using it to maintain the shape they have or the location they’re in.

This one feels like the beginningest beginning to me:

The thin lines or dashes (dashes when they’re horizontal and lines when they’re vertical) are like branches that come off the tree trunk that is the edge, the various edges, of the painting’s surface. Or, they’re seedlings planted in the dirt. Either way, they feel newly exposed to the surrounding space of the painting, that fire-somewhere-far-away-at-night color on the other three sides of them--as if in an older (an in-the-future kind of older--like an elderly man) version of this painting, each of these rectangular, multi-shade pastel shapes would stretch all the way across to the opposite edge of the wood surface.

The two most prominent lines in this painting happen to do just that:

(This photo is from the gallery's Instagram, @ctstategatewaygallery, as I couldn't get a good photo based on where this one was situated)

They’ve gotten to the point where they’re holding up the square surface shape, rather than using the surface as an apparatus to determine what configurations they can maintain as paint shapes. Both of these orientations allow me to feel something shy but sly to these paintings--an entity pokes out or peers over--it's not all the way in view, either from seeming cropped or appearing hazy.

Middles:

The activity in Helen’s middle paintings often matter-of-factly occupies the central space of its surface. Compared to the beginnings, the forms in these paintings have left the edges and are now feeling around in center space. They take place within the otherwise unused, available zones that the rectangular canvases and wood surfaces provide, rather than pushing against or leaning on the shapes of these surfaces. Because of this, or at least partly because of this, there’s an airiness to the paintings--not as though they are lightweight, but an impression that air is what is filling their space, not a density. There’s a declaration to them--a foreword-pushing way that they declare themselves. I feel that predominantly in this outlier bug painting:

It’s the most nameable (recognizable) form in the show and is centered overwhelmingly in the painting surface. I'm inclined to say "overwhelming centered" because of the bug (mosquito?) being disproportionately large compared to the size of the rectangle, with a seeming disregard for the fact that it’s part of a painting at all.

Helen’s paintings include a few different forms of outwardness, of paths of movement.

Things move from one side of the surface to the other:

And from the center outward:

The activity in these last two paintings feels like it could expand out even further, beyond the space of the small surfaces it takes place on. It seems contained by the size of the paintings, which goes to show the kind of substance that it reads as--one that takes the space of whatever container it's put in. I wonder if this contributes to, or even is simply just in keeping with the categorizing of these paintings as middles: Is something that doesn’t rely on edges--that fills up space to whatever boundaries it’s given--is this naturally something that can easily be conceived of as a middle?

Ends:

I call Rosa’s paintings ends for showing a posture and position of presentation--linked as I see this to a finality of sorts. The orientation of the forms within these paintings gives off the feeling that they want to display themselves. The paintings are often made up of two distinct things--two white rectangles, two planes, legs and a tree trunk--things that all retain their individual outlines but that also get paired up and fashioned into a single item.

I see these paintings as not only being made up of the painting process that created them, but the painting process + a “here I am!” reveal. They are the paint that went into them and a framing of themselves as paintings. While they'e not overbearing in this way, this quality still makes them feel the most theatrical.

For example, the red, blue, gray, etc-colored, and splatter-shaped glob forms on this painting look like the result of a specific and even somewhat extraneous process--something stuck onto the surface and removed. There’s no evidence to any part of this imagined process aside from the outcome on this painting, which puts emphasis on a sense of reveal--the painting is the result of something having taken place--an end point. I imagine those red and blue colors being placed between two sheets of white paper that then got unfolded onto this calm green backdrop. This painting displays that action having happened.

The post-painting performance in this one is the slight slouch the object has in leaning against the wall:

The "reveal" in these works is not always a release. Sometimes the reveal takes place as a moment of tension. Like in this painting--a finish that is a pose in precariousness:

I see the most “real-life” actions in Rosa’s paintings. I read three-dimensional acts into these two-dimensional spaces--the unfolding of paper with paint in between for one, and now, I realize the precariousness I put to this orange painting is only from imagining that the forms here are volumetric objects, and feeling them balancing on a narrow spot. What are paintings that are "a reveal" if they're a reveal of objects that aren't really there?

These paintings are not ends because their spaces feel filled and completed, but because they feel situated, perched; even their mostly straight-line forms make them feel more written in stone than the other two sets of paintings. Ends or endings also don't mean stable and resolved, but if anything, a greater level of complication since there's nothing to follow that can help clarify them.

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I wonder if this beginning, middle, and end setup is a way to strike a compromise between the writing and painting worlds. Actually, if it's to first put paintings in the format of words, and then to write about those.

To end in a place of the (still present) questions that I began with: Is writing about painting to write about the words of paint rather than the paint of paint?