Image

(Faithful Iconoclasm)

 

In Nihil, the image matters, but not to the painting.  Whether or not the finished painting seems to hold a recognizable image is not among the considerations for deciding whether it’s finished.  The image marks a place to begin a process, and whether the accumulation and deterioration of the many images that come and go in the course of a painting manages to retain easy legibility in the end, is a matter more of chance than design.  The image is neither meant to convey any particular narrative nor is it meant to be categorically different than a so-called abstract painting. The painting acquires its subject through the accumulation of touches that occurs in working through images.

The value of the image, in Nihil, is that it dictates, to a large degree, the psychological quality of my intentions.  If, for example, I make a drawing or portrait of someone I know, I think of this person in a certain way.  I should alway choose to draw someone I am curious about and for whom I experience genuine compassion.  To draw this person is to say I choose her.  The same is true about anything else I might draw: a place or animal, let’s say.  

Sometimes the image I draw might come from something I find printed on paper, a photograph or illustration, left behind in an abandoned building or even in a shop I find on the Nihil route.  Perhaps it’s not the picture itself I focus my intention toward when I draw it, but on who, when, or what it puts me in mind of.

All that’s important in my treatment of the image is that my intention is directed toward the life of the consciousness it stands for.  Nihil works on the assumption that intention directed in this way leaves its traces on the object itself.  The image is a useful field for the accumulation of intentionality and its trace.  The painting is no more a narrative about the surviving imagery than it is about the buried or eviscerated image the viewer never sees.

I hear the poet Frank X. Gaspar: 

“I wanted to stand in the presence of the real thing and feel it — it’s never the aboutness of anything but the wailing underneath it…”