Why I Paint
Learning to See
For me, painting is about seeing and learning to see. When I paint, I am learning to see as a painter sees. I am strategizing the means to express visual information with the organizational tools of oil, brush, and palette knife. The goal is the expression of “the seen” in such a way that the painting seems to reach a level of transcendent sensitivity. My earliest memories of creating imagery feature this sensibility, that in the process of representing with line and color I am approaching a heightened understanding of the world around me. Each subject asks to be understood as a higher visual truth, and each piece demands that I seek, through line, color, and form adjustments, until this understanding is found.
The Now and the Then
My personal ideas of the possibility of paint, tempered with a rich understanding of the traditions of the past—these inform my decisions as I work. Oil paint allows me to be thoughtful and deliberate in my work, while it allows for evolutionary strategies that can achieve unexpected, surprising effects. Form can be rendered in the depth of its complexity with oils. The light of the moment can be more true to itself in oil paint, I feel.
It is the poetry of forms in light, furthermore, that I want to express, since representational, formal reality is the best expression of the hidden information in visual images. For this I often draw inspiration from past masters. Look at the work of Rembrandt, for example, where qualities of atmosphere, portraiture, and the figure conspire to create an over-arching sense of psychology. Or Titian, who makes us feel the sensual and the spiritual at once in his interpretation of dramatic moments.
Seeing & Dreaming
My current work is sometimes straight from life, sometimes based mainly on imagined imagery. Imagination is ever present. It’s not possible to work without an active internal vision, even when engaged in a straight interpretation of visual data. I love to work from models, though, because I feel that the artist-model relationship conveys a subtle energy that sometimes gets lost when working from reference alone. It’s this life, more like music than verbiage, that gets generated in the process of representing that I want to continue to explore. It’s a subtle current that charges the painting with a force that cannot be stated directly, or in words.
–John Morris
August 2009
