James Zwadlo:
When I’m actually painting, I don’t think
about painting, I think about what I’m doing at the
time. But when I’m not painting, I think about painting
as being about space, because a painting is two-dimensional.
To paint requires taking a point of view in relation to the
world and to the canvas, but that point of view can be located
anywhere in space. When I look around at the world I find
that everything around me looks two-dimensional, as if it
were already a painting. In fact, the only way I know that
I am in space is because everything around looks two-dimensional
(to a Flatlander, everything looks like a line). I believe
that the third dimension is real, but to me it is imperceptible;
I see only a succession of two-dimensional views.
Purely abstract painting is beautiful and the best. In a
purely abstract painting, space and point of view are forgotten,
there’s only a surface. With pure abstraction, we’re
supposedly compensated for losing space by liberation from
historical constraints, laws of perspective and rules of composition.
But the space isn’t really lost; it’s only forgotten,
in the effort to make the surface the point. If we insist
on there always being a point of view in space, as I do, then
one can find one, or remember one; there is the space in front
of the painting, occupied by the viewer, who always has a
point of view.
My point of view, above the ground, looking down, is a simple
rotation of the point of view of someone looking at a painting
on a wall. Viewed from above, people appear flattened, compressed,
and appear to be in the same plane, and part of the purely
abstract surface of the street. Taking only a single point
of view, however, leads to a geometric limitation; the angle
of the overhead view becomes ever more oblique as it moves
away from the perpendicular. This tends to recreate the problems
of perspective, and the illusion of space within the painting
instead of reminding the viewer that they are in space, and
that it is real, and that they can know that only because
the painting appears flat. My solution is to remember that
because the surface can have a perpendicular at every point,
I can place my figures, images of people, as if they were
each being seen simultaneously from the perpendicular, directly
from above. Although a false perspective (multiple perpendicular
points of view), it removes the illusion of space, and shows
you how things really are.
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