Quantum Poetics

Quantum Poetics, preliminary panel

Quantum Poetics, detail

As at September 2007

Watercolour sketch using preliminary panel

Invitation card used as test surface

Printout for planning painting, while at Princeton, Autumn 2007

This text is adapted from an article by Tom Phillips, originally published in TURPS BANANA magazine, March 2008, issn 1749-3994

BIOGRAPHY OF A PAINTING

Just past my 70th birthday. According to the Bible and Dante I’m twice half way through the journey of my life…

The small preliminary panel (10” x 12”) was originally the study for a portrait. For the last two years or so it has been lying around the studio floor but taken up from time to time to improvise freely on, using colours mixed for the working day gone by (artists are great recyclers). Without any plan shapes emerged like clouds forming and reforming. Each layer of the painting revealed the layers beneath in the form of dots or patterns or larger areas where I liked and left the accidents of colours already present; in effect an abstract palimpsest.

I ask Andy my assistant to make up a few panels of the same size, clear the decks somewhat and prepare two of the panels that Andy has made with the sort of roughly painted inchoate surface which would give the picture something to argue against. The main guiding systems were already present, a dialogue between dark and light and a conversation between large calligraphic forms and the intricate ornamentation of which they were made and which they inhabited. The more general question of how large the work would be remained open.

From close up it is a detailed hive of signs. These disappear from any distance and overall it is seen as a simple dark on light design. At such a distance, however, the small patternings and colour shifts serve to vivify and energise surface in general.

Sculptors often say about carving in marble that the imprisoned statue has only to be released from the stone by chipping away the bits that are not it. Here in two dimensions I seem to be working in positive/negative modes taking my cue from what is light to make it dark and vice versa.

If I already had a basic title for my painting I could qualify it with the words ‘a fragment’ as in X: a fragment. One of the few things that can be said with any certainty is that the work squarely declares its incompleteness by implying at all edges its continuation.

Were I now, suddenly, to decide to increase its size and add panels all round I can only imagine I would continue in the same way and end up with edges which would again imply their extension into yet further panels. Thus my painting is a fragment of a larger conjectural fragment which in turn must be a section of a yet larger etc. etc.