Notes to Myself on Beginning a Painting
Richard Diebenkorn was an American painter from California. His early work is associated with abstract expressionism and the Bay Area Figurative Movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
I don't know too much about his work and life, but I recently found his notes about how to begin a painting that I found super interesting. I am particularly fond of number 7, as I am trying to find a new path and different sources are pointing that this will happen only if I take the chance of shaking things, takings risks and accept that things might not happen they way I want them to be.
- Attempt what is not certain. Certainty may or may not come later. It may then be a valuable delusion.
- The pretty, initial position which falls short of completeness is not to be valued — except as a stimulus for further moves.
- Do search. But in order to find other than what is searched for.
- Use and respond to the initial fresh qualities but consider them absolutely expendable.
- Don’t “discover” a subject — of any kind.
- Somehow don’t be bored — but if you must, use it in action. Use its destructive potential.
- Mistakes can’t be erased but they move you from your present position.
- Keep thinking about Pollyanna.
- Tolerate chaos.
- Be careful only in a perverse way.
I was also excited when I read that Rebecca Solnit have read this list. and she added;
“I was raised by someone terrified of making mistakes, so it took me a long time to realize that what we call mistakes are often the only way forward. There’s a muddy, bumpy, steep path with twists and turns and risks, or no path at all. So sometimes it’s not that we choose mistakes over doing it right, but that we choose messy experiments over stuckness. And then you look back at the loud, dumb-feeling, turbulent uncomfortable moment or era, and that’s what got you from there to here. ”
Sadly, Rebecca wrote that on her Facebook page, so I cannot link that quote.
Below are some of Diebenkorn paintings.
