I am having a rather well started painting morning, and will take these moments to reflect on some particular thoughts I had.
I often think about how to explain the subtle power of painting that can turn a piece from a mess to a masterpiece. I ponder the quandary of understanding offered by Art’s special way of combining the objective and subjective, individualism and universality, taste and truth. And in my own work, I am constantly finding the recipes changing as the ingredients take on a life of their own.
There is something to the comparison of Art to food. It can help to explain why some things work and some don’t, often in subtle ways. For example, take spaghetti sauce, one of my personal specialties. Even with the most basic and even poor quality ingredients, one can combine the contents in such a way that maximizes what they have, making something delicious. Another person may use the same ingredients and come up with something that is, politely, nothing to write home about. Use fresh and natural ingredients, combine them with time and love, and you have a wonderful sauce. Add too much salt to that otherwise wonderful sauce, and it becomes not only unpalatable, but less healthy as well. Add a few never before used ingredients to that spaghetti sauce, or experiment with an inventive way or process to create a new kind of sauce (even with the same ingredients.) You take a chance of making a big mess, but you also take a chance of making something that can redefine the way we eat spaghetti.
Art is similar in that it has the same physical laws of ingredient mixing that cooking has, add too much of one thing and you won’t get the taste you are looking for. You might improve your original intent, or you may diminish it. But adding “this to that and that to this” does specific things, even within the inherent capacity everything has for being affected by infinite variables.
In relation to abstraction, there are dishes that some people won’t eat because it is unfamiliar, or does not look like what they would call food. But take away that rejection, that wall against consuming it, and they may find it to be delicious beyond what they thought possible. I felt that way when I finally let Pollock into my diet. Jackson, not the fish. And on that note…
I worked in seafood slaughterhouses for years, and at one of them I saw how you could press on a dead salmon’s belly and cause a post mortem seminal ejaculation of considerable force. I then learned that such fluid was sometimes used as food or medicine in China, Japan, and other countries, with “cod milt” being a choice product. I even tried “fugu milt” (blowfish) on my first trip to Japan. I am a vegetarian now.
I assimilated this concept into my painting vocabulary. I paint thick, often using ziploc bags to apply my pigments. I describe the phenomenon of paint and medium shooting out of a pressed plastic bag with unexpected velocity as “cod-milting” (salmon milting doesn’t have the same ring). In fact, a particularly forceful cod-milting experience in my studio just now provided the impetus to write this post. Another way in which our culinary experiences weave through with our connection to Art. Bon Appetit!