brettworks

“Where do you put a form? It will move all around, bellow out and shrink, and sometimes it winds up where it was in the first place. But at the end it feels different, and it had to make the voyage. I am a moralist and cannot accept what has not been paid for, or a form that has not been lived through.”

“So then it means that to be an artist you always have to do something the first time.”

“I want to do what nature doesn’t do. I mean, I can look out and see trees blowing, wind moving, and things are happening. I don’t have to duplicate that. But what I don’t see is a single form that’s vibrating away, constantly, forever and ever and ever to keep vibrating. And that seems to be magical as hell, enigmatic as hell, really. Gee, I never said that before, that way.”

“And I don’t want to be an artist really.
But I am and I’m going to be and I want to make these forms.”

“The idea is: Don’t stop. So, I’ll draw. And they’re goofy drawings. I mean, just searching, searching, searching, and they’re germinating. My painting comes out of drawing. I couldn’t live without drawing. I know that. It’s constant. You scribble. You draw. Okay.”

“Drawing and painting is a chain of events.”

“I think that creating is a double process. You have to be sophisticated as hell and innocent as hell at the same time. It’s a real impossibility, but I think that’s what it is.”

“But I think the difference between a philosopher or an aesthetician and a painter, and I guess it’s also true with a poet and with a man who works with sound, is that the moment you use the stuff there’s a commitment, a resistance, where you’re not so free. And paradoxically, when you can only do this and not that, in order to move it over an inch and not two miles, you’re more free in some mysterious metaphysical way. You don’t have so many choices. So I’m a great believer in matter, in the material. For me, it’s all personal. Speculation about what I’ve done always seems to come later. I always get snarled up.”

“What bores me is to see an illustration of my thought. That would bore me. I want to make something I never saw before and be changed by it. So that I go in the studio and I see these things up and I think, Jesus, did I do
that? What a strange thing. And I like to feel strange.

“Things get squashed, are pushing each other, and all that. I like that feeling. Things dent each other, they affect each other. So, when do I know I’m finished? It’s when the drawing isn’t padded. That is, it’s not repaired or tickled. And where the line is alive. Where the line is making the form at the moment of the doing of it. I enjoy the feeling of the thing being caught at a very special certain moment. At a split-second moment the thing is caught, like it just came into existence. And it’s about to change into something else.”

“When I complete a painting that feels real – I think afterwards that I have found a way – a road. And my mind races on – painting pictures in my head. Infinite possibilities. What a delusion this is. All the possibilities – oh, at last I know. These are mere notions – proven to be so when you start painting again. They all tumble down when paint is put on. And again you must learn that there is no road – no way – all you possess is the luck to
learn to see each time – freshly. Newly. No good to paint in the head – what happens is what happens when you put the paint down – you can only hope that you are alert – ready – to see. What joy it is for paint to become a thing – a being. Believe in this miracle – it is your only hope. To will this transformation is not possible. Only a slow maturation can prepare the hand and eye to become quicker than ever. Ideas about art don’t matter. They collapse anyway in front of the painting.”