Kalliope’s Reviews > Contre-Jour: A triptych after Pierre Bonnard > Status Update

Most of us remain wrapped up and dry all our lives. Then we die and that's the end of it. But the great artists of the past, they dipped themselves in water, they underwent that baptism. Daily. And so they expanded. Opened up. Unexpected colours came into view. And now we know what humanity is capable of. What flowers. That's one of the things that great Piero baptism is about, the Immersion.

He thinks about landscape all the time. A landscape doesn't have to be outside. It can be in a room. And people like treats, rivers.

There is plenty of time. Plenty of time. I feed the picture as one feeds a large animal. I stand and watch it and then, when I sense it is hungry, I feed it.

What you wanted was to disappear entirely, to efface yourself from his presence. There was something that was killing you in his evenhanded depiction of everything around him. In other words, of him.

So his work is never simple description, it always includes a sense of the before and after.

A writer does not know how long his book is going to be when he starts, so why should a painter be expected to know the size of his pictures'

And do you know what that made me feel? Not just that I was not wanted, but that I did not exist. I had never existed and I would never exist. So that now as I sit here and talk to you it does not seem to me that I have a past at all and I am certain I have no future.

But what I want to paint excites me as I sit or walk, is the way things are seen out the corner of the eye, are felt at the edges of consciousness.