Dennis Hollingsworth

Last Week

Last week was like this.

The way I have been painting has been expanding the range of how I touch paint to canvas, evolving over time a print type of mark making that involves applying paint and removing it. This could be construed as a claim on paint-as-material that spans from a smudge to a wad all done directly while the paint was wet. Wet in to wet. The immersion into material as a meditation vortex that could conjure a subject as it spins.. (The revision, elisions leaving traces, this parenthetical aside itself is a corallary of this kind of painting in text.)

All of this a fancy way of streamofselfconsciousnessly saying that I have been putting paint down and scraping it up all through the week, only to have the week end at Saturday with what I thought at the time to be a monumental scrape off. In the past, I would have considered this to be a "game over" moment. Given that the virginal aspect of the painting was shot, I would have considered flipping the strategy to something that buldoses the bodies below another kind of painting. But the imprintation of paint brings me back to that layering strategy that I originally sought to sidestep by working Allah Prima Alla Prima. All paintings proceed from something done, then something else done... and it was the ability to plumb the depths of those layers with eviscerating scoops and blurring drags that canceled out the fixed rigidity of superpositioning that was the name of the thing that irritated me.

It seemed as if I was visited by Gaff last week, who left the origami unicorn late Saturday afternoon to tell me I wasn't all that. So I took Sunday off to think about it all.

But this morning, I liked what I saw when I came into the studio. And the surface was still sticky to boot. The wet into wet is still wet.