the measure of a painting – like traveling, perhaps, or friendships, love relationships, love-making itself, dancing, conversation, watching a movie, and so many other activities that are life-giving, is the feeling or set of feelings that we have during the actual activity itself. Robert Henri once encouraged painters to pretend that they were dancing a painting. This is my point exactly, but my not so imaginative wrinkle on this is to encourage painters to pretend that they are singing a painting.

Kim’s is messy just right: it seems to be the by-product of a visual exploration, one that suggests that she isn’t looking for results so much as she works, but rather is immersed in a sensual rush that perculates as she converses with what she sees. She not only seems to be exploring but finding, finding bits and pieces, splats and scratches that lie beyond the facts. This, to me, is the mark of a serious artist. The subject is not the figure in the end. The figure was just the prompt, the point of departure. The subject is always Kim.

Picasso believed the same could be said for painting: “To be finished means to be through with it, to kill it, to rid it of its soul, to give it its final blow, the most unfortunate one for the painter as well as for the painting.”

Feeling “larger” during and because of the creative process is the name of the game. The painting just happens along the way.

If you paint the sun, you are always confronted with a specific choice: you either have to try and establish the correct value relationship by making the sun very light on your canvas or you must go for the color, in which case the value relationship will be incorrect but the color relationship will be closer to the truth.

We would do well to drop the term avant-garde and to stop thinking in terms of art movements generally. So much of the “it has never been done before” shock-of-the-new during the latter half of the 20th century was contrived, top down, investment driven efforts to turn junk into iconic art products.

Duchamp, as either genius or pawn, remains a central figure in 20th century visual art. Again Marquis: “Duchamp opened the door – even the museum door – to art featuring feces, urine, and other bodily fluids; to art based on junk recovered from the city dump; to art involving cadavers and maggots; and to art with aggressively sexual themes. Artists who display their own naked or provocatively clothed bodies may also point to Duchamp. In short, the avant-garde art of the late twentieth century flaunts impropriety, defiance, messiness, and snickering disdain for the vast majority of museum-goers.”

Pushing in this sense means to push oneself further, to strain or reach further. Feeling and seeing more richly, however, does not come about by simply looking more intently. The particularity of any given feeling, when I paint, arises out of an expression of who I am in the moment that I am making choices. A writer may choose one word or a series of words from a vocabulary of 100,000 separate words, for example. In my case, as a painter, I must choose a very specific color and a way of applying the color, also from thousands of possibilities. That is how I express myself as a painter. I must act, I must choose. My choices will differ from someone else’s. That is why a painting will be called, if it is sincere, a Monet or a Renoir or a Smith, Jones, or Fresia.