Having just written some fifteen hundred words and only just now approaching the exit of the first room of this expedition, I feel as though some changes to the structure of the project are in order, on the one hand to maintain a particular potential for interest, and on the other to make possible the conclusion of the project before the month’s end. From this point forward, I’m going to allow myself to edit; after all, making notes is often more about the salient tidbits than the punctuation (it’s just a little difficult when the notes are ostensibly about the punctuation).
With that said, I feel that this first exercise highlights several important elements of the paintings that share their scrutinous process. This is pretty boring stuff, but within it are moments of strange discovery and excitement. While this process of looking and describing is quite protracted, it has a neat little trick that seems to make those smaller moments of discrepancy and accident all the more exciting. There is a skewed kind of drama offered to an intense focus within the simple, quiet moment, and the places I describe, which have been built and lived in for some time, offer their eroded surfaces and chipped edges openly within it.
***
So here we are, standing at the doorway to the bathroom.
I like doors, and doorways - and windows for that matter. They always find their way into my work. I mentioned earlier that one of my interests is finding and painting things that are themselves like paintings. I feel as though doors and windows are a fairly accurate analogue in a number of ways. There is a curious potential to these transitional spaces, physical boundaries with their own physical boundaries. I like the idea of a liminal space being defined so literally and rigidly, as if these places of passage might not only be described by the activity of passage, but by the signposts that display and protract its evidence and age.
