I was in a gallery the other week looking at a painting and I pulled up an old thing on my phone, a micro-essay from here about looking at a painting by Willem de Kooning, because I needed to remind myself of some of the questions I like to ask when I’m looking at a painting and trying to give it time to settle in my brainpan.
Where is the darkest spot, where is the brightest? Where is it weightless, where is it heavy?
Am I thinking about what this thing reminds me of, rather than taking it on its own terms?
Also this:
If I take out the painting’s whats and hows, what is the painting’s why?
The questions are from a list I used to give writing students for a field trip to an art museum. I’d tell them to pick a room and choose the first painting they felt drawn to, then plant themselves in front of it and just look, see what happened. If they got stuck or bored – they weren’t allowed to move until I collected them fifteen minutes later – they might use the questions to prompt ideas.
A few more:
Who would be this painting’s type on a dance floor?
What does the painting encourage me to feel?
If I’m dissatisfied, how much of that’s to do with what I think the picture should be, rather than what it is?
The idea came from a hunch, which I still believe, that we often don’t give paintings their due. The labor to make them is pretty extraordinary. Even awful ones require hours, maybe months, of diligent attempts, rethinking, goals changed along the way.
Six more:
If I take out the painting’s whats and hows, what is the painting’s why?
If the painting meets a Freudian, what are the first notes?
What type of person should this painting marry?
Where’s the depth of field, the depth of color, and which is more important?
Where is the picture conflicted or contrary?
If something in the image is very hot (like a really alcoholic wine), or supercharged (like someone on cocaine), or pedantic (like someone on coke and really alcoholic wine), what are the quieter spots saying?
What’s funny, maybe, is I’m not very interested in artists. I don’t read their biographies. I’m interested in audiences and what makes them respond in their peculiar ways. Because paintings, for all their oils and wood, still have ego, have aspirations; even the ones that aren’t good are struggling to say something.
Sometimes I’ll think, what is this painting casting off without knowing? Like a teenager waiting in line at 7-11.
Is this painting fast or slow?
Is it somebody I want to fuck? Somebody I want to camp in the mountains with for a year?
What is this painting prone to?
Is this painting behaving oddly, and if so, in a style natural or contrived?
Is it ever inexhaustible?
Is it something I want to own?
I don’t teach at the moment, but my wife and I play a similar game in museums – it’s also a fun game with nieces and nephews – where we try to guess which painting in a room is the other person’s favorite. Then, when the person identifies their favorite, they have to explain why. Most art comes from a period from which it can’t divorce itself; at the same time, something like The Scream speaks louder than the fact it was made in 1893.
It comes down the fact that some paintings make me really happy, and some make me uncomfortable. Some seem like puzzles, and some I simply don’t want to look at, I turn away. A painting is a dormant thing, it doesn’t clench or unclench, whereas I’m the one with the cerebrum and the heart, I’m the one who walks away, changed or not.
In tomorrow’s supplement for supporters
How to cross the Place de la Concorde without getting hit by a car (or rip the crotch out of your pants);
Uplifting British post-punk to play on repeat, and new country;
What happens when you bring together people with weird laughs, plus a couple other interesting things found this week on the web.
If you’d like to get more than just the preview, go blue:
What the what
“Meditations in an Emergency,” published Saturdays by writer Rosecrans Baldwin, is a weekly mini-essay about something he finds beautiful, with a longer piece once a month for paying subscribers, written in the woods.
Also for paying subscribers: a Sunday supplement, three weeks a month, with three-plus ideas of things to love, no paid placements 💀
Rosecrans is the author most recently of Everything Now: Lessons From the City-State of Los Angeles (2022 California Book Award), now available in paperback from Bookshop, L’Amazon, or preferably your local store. Other books include The Last Kid Left and Paris, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down. His debut novel, You Lost Me There, was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice.
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