15 Jul ‘stretching canvases-attitude’ and ‘how a painting gets born”
Rather than seeing the manual labor as a chore, (because the job ‘has’ to get done), I have learned to love the process of building a canvas from scratch. I will often stretch three or four canvases at a time, so that I don’t have to take a break between paintings: I can merely pull them out of the racks like thin pieces of paper. My whole physical self goes into the construction of stretchers, then stretching the canvas over the stretchers so that it pulls tightly, ‘(just so,’ as I need the “exact bounce” for the application of paintbrush onto the canvas, so that the canvas responds),’ then glued, and then primed. All the while I am going through this 3-day building process, I am imagining how a painting get born, i.e., how it will transcend from where I left off in the last painting. My thinking already is, “Take what the last painting’s most inventive ideas are and make them become something larger. “Start from there,” I convince myself. My canvas-making is highly skilled, much like a violinist’s presence going into the instrument as it is constructed. Once the blank canvas is placed vertically on the easel, it already becomes something other than what it was when it was while being primed flat on the ground. I stand for long periods of time facing it until my body knows even before I do what color, what shape, how it will be placed, and where it will go, breaks the silence of all that stark white flatness. Each subsequent placing of paint is in a ‘call and response’ mode to other paint marks. The whiteness is replaced by the movement that occurs between the colors from the very first marks. ‘If’ the white comes back, (in the form of paint), it is because it becomes integrated as a color in relation to other colors, so that the white moves, too, rather than being left over when a color is placed. Thus, the beginning of a new painting.