Let the battle commence!

oil on canvas on hardboard

corner/convex painting 181 x 121 x 13 cm

With every new painting I stand before the blank white canvas in a puddle of doubt. I start a painting by telling myself “Let the battle commence!” and finish when… I’ve run out of ideas. Then I start another in that same puddle of doubt. I have spent my entire life since I set off on this adventure in that puddle. Is it a good idea? Is it well done? Was it worth the effort? Should I change it? Do I like it? Does anyone like it? Do you like it? There’s a saying, You only paint one picture in your life and all the rest are variations. 

Every time I finish a painting I feel that the battle is over and I’ve won… until the following week when I ask myself, should it be a bit bluer, a bit darker, bigger or..? and then end up making another variation.

The painting is a painting of a painting being painted. Giancarlo likes conceptual art and my painting is 100% conceptual because it looks unfinished despite the fact that it is - except that it’s not signed. If it were signed then the signature would mean it was finished, but then it would no longer be in the process of being painted. The corners of the canvas on the easel have not been painted in order to show that it is still in the process and yet, I think, the landscape is painted enough in order for the viewer to understand the image is a landscape and not a portrait. This means the purpose is to tell the viewer what the painting is about - and it does. Therefore it is finished - even though every square centimetre of the canvas has not been painted. This is the reason why I no longer paint on rectangular or square formats: why paint those areas on the canvas on the easel which are white? They're not necessary as the viewer has already understood what the painting is about. 

The reason the canvas is concave is because the view is a panorama, the eyes have to look from the left to the right and not just in front of them. This means turning the neck: when the head looks left the eyes cannot see what’s on the right until the neck turns, and when it does its lost sight of what the eyes were just looking at on the left. The experience of seeing what was there needs the memory, this is why I like using multiple view points in paintings. Realism is not real it’s just an idea of what is or was. Shaped paintings are more real because the memory links all those, real, views together. We don’t look like a camera does with individual snap shots; everything we see is related - until we go to sleep on a plane and wake up in Australia.