'...But I cannot tell you what...'

'...I can only metaphorically wave my arms...and say look.'

‘IN INDIAN PAINTING I HAVE FOUND MUCH THAT FOR ME COULD NOT BE FOUND ANYWHERE ELSE, BUT I CANNOT TELL YOU WHAT – I CAN ONLY METAPHORICALALY WAVE MY ARMS AT THE PICTURES AND SAY LOOK.’   

Howard Hodgkin/ the image: The Monkey Prince Angada delivers Rama’s message to Ravana/ Manuka, ca. 1725/collection of the MET

Besides the provocative and multi-tiered paradox Hodgkin uses to introduce his (longstanding) relationship with Indian painting, perhaps the spirit behind those words ‘… MUCH THAT FOR ME COULD NOT BE FOUND ANYWHERE ELSE…’, if pointed in another direction, hints at how we might approach the often unexpected, marginalized visual mysteries within our day to day, if we stop to pay attention.

Many of us who stay close to our eyes recognize that how we illuminate and receive seemingly ordinary visual moments between waking and sleeping is not a verbal, linear or academic process and perhaps doesn’t need to be named as much as felt. What and how we do with what we see is our own business and cannot be systematized, and as is suggested within Hodgkin’s words, making meaning is our own responsibility, and begins with how we see.

So how do we taste seeing and what do we do with that? How do we receive and use the messages within the every day choreography of form beyond the subject matter conversation?

As a younger painter, I was raised within the long shadow of a historical tradition embracing sustained devotion to place, either close to home as was the case with John Constable in Suffolk, England or on the other hand, the painter who traveled repeatedly to distant places, like Turner and his extended relationship with Italy. Or more recently Emily Nelligan, going from either NYC or CT to an island off the coast of Maine to draw on smallish pieces of paper with charcoal for 70 years. And then there was Morandi standing for 50 years in his studio smoking cigarettes, with brush in hand looking at the same objects on the same studio tables over and over again.

For them and for many others, REPETITION was a foundational way of life.  

The OED offers an etymological origin for REPETITION in Classical Latin:  the act of demanding or claiming back,

and implicitly, the act of demanding or claiming back requires an active engagement (vs. passive) from the viewer.

Decades ago, when setting myself up as an out of doors painter I discovered that repetition - going back to familiar places over and over again, often rendered them, ironically, less familiar and stranger (in the best senses), and also opened pathways of seeing and feeling into and through time that would not have been accessible with just one hit. And that repetition and return into and through time, revealed how felt time or time felt, could then be built into/layered into, the intentional and emergent voice of a paint surface.

However, the focus today is not on the making of paintings, but rather on suggesting what repetition feels like, and then you can draw your own conclusions, my job is to say, go look.

So it’s July 2012 and I’m driving along 33^rd Street in Strawberry Mansion (Philadelphia), an area I knew well from past years of out of doors painting.

And there on 33^rd St (near Dauphin St), is this unexpectedly, glorious visual feast of demolition and machinery, immediately compelling, I pulled over, stopped the car and jumped out.

Since early childhood construction and demolition sites had been an obsession whose tidal pull I never questioned, and this one, with the huge yellow giraffe having a nap in the foreground, was delicious beyond words. The entire place felt like a beckoning finger saying, ‘hey you, come here’. Submitting to the tug of visual desire is a huge theme for me, so how could I resist?

Moving in closer for a better look and with the camera, zooming in and looking up, ahhh, so fine. Just as the bumble bee moves through the garden one flower at a time, from this one to that, so it is with the eye being beckoned across the façade and into the spaces, from one point to the next, like tracing a sequential link of stars in a night sky constellation.

Zooming in and looking at everything in black and white. Color of course is beautiful but b&w, always so revealing.

Then, that unexpected still hanging shredded wallpaper, sooo tasty…

Two years later, 2014, driving down the same street, another surprise, all was gone, totally cleared out, but look what’s revealed!

Across the now empty lot we now have such a choreography of shape and weight, the back sides of the houses on the next block over, the arrangement of shapes back there, by visual association, reminiscent of the organizational architecture of Morandi.

Returning again in the next season, more demolition and this time we can see even further back.

And then months later in spring time, quite mind boggling.

And finally later in 2014, all gone.

We can’t invent stuff like this.

What all this is or how I make sense of it, can’t be put into words and visual meaning to me is not the same as for you. The point is to engage and perhaps to see or to feel each moment as a question, not an answer, but what that question is, is exactly the paradox of Hodgkin’s statement.  ‘I CAN ONLY METAPHORICALLY WAVE MY ARMS… AND SAY LOOK.’

The rest is up to you.