On Sep 1, 2008, at 5:12 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Now he needs to
come up with speech and action for Bren that does exactly that --
and that's
where the inspiration comes in. Perhaps the most satisfying giddily
pleasing
moments for a writer are when he finds himself wondering, "Where did
that come
from!"
I pay attention to etymology, often. Inspiration, from "to breathe
into," conjures up the Muses or God or some other force putting
something into the artist. ("Enthusiasm" comes from en-,in, and theos,
god, meaning possessed by a god).
I have the hardest problem just starting. I do not do preliminary
drawings as drafts or working drawings for a painting. I make drawings
for themselves, line and shading images of the model (figure, flower,
landscape, object, etc.). Then I choose a drawing to redraw on the
canvas and from there proceed to let the painting "emerge" or
"evolve" (actually, I never think of that term) or "develop" or
"grow" (not that one, either). The painting 'happens', it 'becomes' by
virtue of how I continue to paint. Since paintings do not embody a
time span in their seeing, I don't think that by painting a given part
first, I set the stage or prepare the viewer for X. Sometimes,
however, when I do paint a given part Y, I see --literally-- that it
looks better than I imagined, that something happened in the actual
paint that I could not foresee, so that I am conscious of that quality
or effect as I continue to paint.
Some years ago, I painted a lot of very similar abstract paintings.
The first one I made in conscious homage to Motherwell's Elegies, and
I quite liked it. Then for the next three or four, I continued to
reiterate the same visual theme, but the power of the first one
rapidly wore off and I soon stopped them.
Here are nine of them:
http://www.unc.edu/~jbrady/Paintings/1980-89/Paintings80-89_2.html
And another five:
http://www.unc.edu/~jbrady/Paintings/1980-89/Paintings80-89_2b.html
(BTW, I named them years later, in the 90s, not in 1983.)
Up to this time (early 80s) the nonfigurative colored shapes in my
figural paintings were pretty hard-edged, e.g.:
http://www.unc.edu/~jbrady/Paintings/1980-89/1982-5.html
http://www.unc.edu/~jbrady/Paintings/1980-89/1982-1.html
But what I really retained from my sojourn into a completely abstract
idiom was the use of some shapes in these paintings, and more
specifically ultimately derived from Motherwell, which I adapted in my
subsequent figural paintings, such as:
http://www.unc.edu/~jbrady/Paintings/1997/1997-6.html
http://www.unc.edu/~jbrady/Paintings/1998/1998-5.html
http://www.unc.edu/~jbrady/Paintings/1998/1998-3.html
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Michael Brady
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
