3 weeks in 2 minutes
Dear friends,
One day in the early 1990s, I asked Joan Mitchell how she knew what she would do when she next walked up to her canvas. She replied, “I wouldn’t walk up to the canvas if I didn’t know exactly what I was going to do!” Just starting out, I found that reply extraordinarily unhelpful.
This summer, starting a large diptych in Minnesota, I tried something new: setting up a camera to record the process of making a painting. Over three weeks, it registered the blue of June’s early morning light, the march of the afternoon shadows, and the deep magenta of the setting sun. As the painting developed, the camera accumulated several thousand frames (one per minute), leaving me with a 2-minute time-lapse of the painting process:
Each perceived moment in the world may seem stable, but reframed in a continuous flow, reminds us that we inhabit a sequence of unique configurations of light, wind, and weather. In the video, hats, sweaters, and shorts appear and disappear. Unseen — but more important — is the internal weather, the excitement, even elation, interspersed with indecision, mistakes, moments of despair. A painting is necessarily a palimpsest, the physical record of infinitely subtle feelings driving unrecoverable processes of decision-making.
I usually begin with open drawing, then patches of color; draw, paint, paint more, draw again, flip the painting to see it differently, put paint on, take paint off, increase saturation, gray it down, draw the viewer in, push the eye back, make a deep space, bring things to the surface, over and over until it starts to feel right.
Perhaps the most perplexing thing about the painting process is the degree to which it seems to have its own logic, as though the painting were dictating its progress via a dense set of calculations to which I have only partial access. I am, of course, always trying to manage basic formal qualities, but in the service of an abstract work in which something of the world appears, not just as a literal recording, but also as something remembered, imagined, on the cusp of being lost.
In this series, I have been trying to incorporate cues from nature, but also give them form with varying degrees of modulation, distancing, and interposition. We are losing the world as we have known it, and I wanted the painting to have an elegiac quality. In the end, I don’t think Lake Diptych VII goes nearly far enough in that direction, but that just puts useful pressure on the next work.
Thinking back to my early confusion about what to do next, I now understand the difficulty. First, I couldn’t yet see clearly what the picture was doing: the degree to which it hung together, or where my marks stood in space. More critically, I wasn’t sufficiently clear about what I wanted a painting to say, much less able to put paint-handling in the service of that voice. Long decades later, it’s both strange and wonderful that I can modulate the blue of an endangered lake with a torrent of graphite powder, or a veil of knifed-on gray to say something subtle about where we stand in relation to the world. Still, I expect Joan’s certainty to remain elusive.
I hope you will watch the time-lapse here, and I’ve just added works from this past year to my portfolio at cbcampbell.com.
Christopher Campbell