I can only illuminate my own practice in writing as much as I can distinguish between the intent for the work I wanted to make and the reality of the work I made. The conceptual basis for my working methods is one that privileges the relatively unpolicable approaches of intuition, improvisation, and the vague assertion that no strategy was employed. All of this, though facile, is not propped up to distract from the obvious material criteria of a particular color palette, surface quality, or insistence on a certain kind of repetitive imagery. Instead, it is there to say that the paintings are figured out in the process of their resolution, and that there is no distinction between the act of painting and the object of a painting.
Every painting ever made enacts, broadly speaking, a philosophy of the relationship between what is visible and the possibilities of what can be visualized, of immanence and transcendence. The History of Painting offers illusion as a stated figure for the latter. Painting's relationship to illusion, to the material deception of perceptivity, is always socially determined, to the extent that painting enacts a philosophy not only of what can be and has not yet been perceived, but also of what is and what is knowable to a group of people.
I grew up watching a lot of cartoons, and I came to painting through first an interest in comics. I remember the day as a teenager when my friend showed me a painting he made, which was this moody and imaginative portrait of a musician he really liked at the time. I remember how it filled me with this sense of possibility and curiosity about the world that I had formerly been underexposed to. I immediately took to replicating that painting in my own time behind closed doors, desperately working water into oil paint on a paper plate palette, fumbling through a stupid desire to make something without any practical knowledge of what I was trying to do beyond the vague cultural idea that paintings were about emotion and were made with paint.
Having gone through the exhaustive, liberating arc of the avant-garde, everything about painting is simply available to us. This is not to say that its only use is to casually reiterate what was once radical; rather, history provides us with the freedom to approach the medium with renewed attention to the limits of its existence. That nothing is self-evident about painting serves to remind us that to be an artist is always to be becoming an artist, a task completed immediately once taken on. Our ability to make choices within that freedom, and our willingness to address the descending thresholds of surface, support, and context, are what make painting possible as a becoming art.
- Christine Burgon
