Creative Doodlings: Response to Living Color

Shortly after (or before) I read this post, I went to a friend's house and we both did so

me painting with acrylic and canvas. I had not painted before.I ended up painting with my fingers and palm since I could go across the canvas faster. I didn't have to worry about form and balance as much when the "brush" was that wide.

Your post came back to me. There were so many vivid acrylic colors, and mixing them made the possibilities seem endless. There was more to the experience. Touching the canvas, rubbing it, having my hand travel across it's slightly bumpy surface. The close texture of the naked canvas is quite arresting by itself. The feeling of applying the paint, both feeling the ease and the resistance as I was doing it was new to me. I used a comb to create rhythmic waves on the canvas after I had applied two layers of paint to it, and that ended up being how I spaced out the two objects I carved with my comb. The sound of the comb grating the canvas, the excitement and intrigue of creating those shapes. That was the first time I ever had painted, and a lot of this will be lost if someone just looks at the painting. What remains is the "chaff and dregs" as Chuang Tzu wrote.

What would it be like to live in a different environment? Would I function differently? What is important is that I need this environment you describe. But maybe there is a difference between receiving painting and actually doing it. It makes painting mine. I am a painter now! My experience of "Painting" has become much richer since that session that when I see this word, it involves more faculties that I have used in the past to interact with it. I am more conscious of being a fuller being with painting since it is not only my eyes or fingers that are excited when I think about it now.

The first idea that occurred to me when I read your post was this. Actually, I don't remember exactly! The next clear idea was a challenge: how do I make a photograph of forms of greens that were so alive as to counter what you were saying? But, now that I think of it, a photograph is different in nature to a painting. It takes its material from the observable world. In itself, it doesn't seem to be an object but a representation of an alternate reality. Cheating, in a way.

I was walking in Potter Zoo today, and an idea that had occurred to me presented itself. How can I take Brown, Grey and White and turn them into something expressive? In the first place, why those colors: Last year, in my hotel in Sao Paulo (a couple of days after I had left Greece) something happened to me that marked me so much that I wrote my experience down. Here are some of my notes:

I remove 2 batteries I had bought in Greece and throw them, one by one, on the spotless white pillow in my hotel room. As they land with a dull thud, a small imperfect circle of dust and grit forms, so fragile and foreign to this impeccable, sterile environment, polluting its perfection with a taint of spontaneity - the folly produced by randomness that rejuvenates our spirits periodically over the course of our lives. For the first time in days, my soul finds a haven... For a moment in time, the world was only I and that imperfect circle of dust and grit... etc... etc...

The question you clarified to me is: when does a "manufactured" environment become oppressive for me? when am I at ease with it?