Painting figures

The thrill of power or the thrill of contact

I haven’t been interested in drawing or painting anything mimetic lately. In fact, I’ve been profoundly averse. Wanting instead to find forms in the unformed recesses of consciousness—mine, the collective, I don’t care as long as I’m not just copying something in the visible world. That is, until I saw some pictures from Easter that my mom took of my stepdad’s dog Clifford. He’s so cute with his bunny ears! He ended up looking a lot more dignified in this drawing. Wise even.

I am starting to consider that there might be reasons other than mastery or control to want to capture the things of this world. I’ve often thought of representational art as suspect—a tool of domination, used by authoritarian impulses to control the viewer, an imposition of meaning on the receiver, an ego trip. So yeah, Cliffie got me thinking about the thrill of power vs the thrill of contact. And maybe I can return to figuration with a more expanded sense of its possibilities and effects.