What is “paint as paint”?

The title of my blog comes from an essay on painting I read recently, written by Russell Ferguson. In the essay he quotes painter Neil Jenney,

“I am not trying to duplicate something that I see in nature because you must always compromise – it is always going to be paint, you cannot out paint the paint. I was not trying to disguise the fact that these were paintings. I was not trying to mimic photographs.”

This is key to how I paint. I am not interested in recreating reality. My work is more complex. It is about paint and about painting. It is also about me, my relationship to the world outside of my body and thoughts, the interaction of myself with the world and my intellectual and spiritual reaction to all of this.

Ferguson comments on Jenney saying, “This embrace of paint as paint is more common in the rhetoric of abstration.” (p53 “The Undiscovered Country)

That phrase “paint as paint” stuck in my head for a long time afterwards. I love how it sums up the idea of not trying to pretend a painting is reality but a painting that reveals its materiality, doesn’t try to pretend it’s something that it’s not, honest and open.

Here are some quotes from Gerhard Richter from “The Daily Practice of Painting”,

“Painting is the making of an analogy for something nonvisual and incomprehensible: giving it form and bringing it within reach.”

“Pictures are the idea in visual or pictorial form; and the idea has to be legible, both in the individual picture and in the collective context – which presupposes, of course, that words are used to convey information about the idea and the context. However, none of this means that pictures function as illustrations of an idea: ultimately they are the idea. Nor is the verbal formulation of the idea a translation of the visual: it simply bears a certain resemblance to the meaning of the idea. It is an interpretation, literally a reflection. I want the picture; the single, self-contained construct – even if in the next breath I cast doubt on its self-containment.”

 

Related articles

• Gerhard Richter, Tate Modern, London (independent.co.uk)