Text, Colour, and the Mess of Saying Something
This painting argues with itself. That’s the simplest way I can put it. There are words all over the surface — French, English, fragments of sentences I half-remember — and they’re fighting with the colour for attention. “La peinture,” “this is a painting,” “there was,” phrases that loop and contradict and get buried under the next layer of yellow or pink. And the thing is, I didn’t plan most of them. They showed up the way graffiti shows up on a wall: because the surface was there and something needed to be said. Not a manifesto. More like a muttering. The piece is 60 x 60 inches of that — accumulated speech and accumulated paint, neither one winning.
Surface Choices
Honestly, this painting would have been a completely different animal on panel. I needed the give. Canvas flexes when you push into it, and for a piece this loaded with text and gesture, that slight bounce-back mattered. Every time I pressed a brush handle into the wet surface to scratch a word, the canvas dipped and sprang back, leaving a softer-edged line than I’d get on something rigid. Linen would have been too slick. The medium-tooth cotton held onto the thin washes but still let me scrape back without tearing — which I did, a lot, especially in the lower left where “Le” sits on top of what used to be an entire blocked-in composition I abandoned.
What I’d Do Differently
The mauve arc on the right side. Too heavy. I laid it in late in the process because the right edge felt empty compared to the dense, word-choked left half, and I overcorrected. If I could go back I’d have used a drier brush — chalk-dry, barely loaded — and let the arc break apart instead of sitting there so solidly. It reads as a border when everything else in the painting resists borders.
And I wish I’d left more of the grey showing in the upper centre. There was a moment — maybe three sessions in — where the dripped vertical strokes and that quiet grey made a kind of window. I painted over most of it chasing something louder.
Context
Peinture Painting belongs to the Canvas series, which is where I work through ideas that need room and tooth and the specific drag of acrylic on cotton. Every piece in the series starts big — at least four feet in one direction — because I need to move my whole body, not just my wrist. This one pushes the series further into language than most. Other Canvas works deal primarily with colour fields and gestural mark-making, but here the contemporary abstract painting process got tangled up with text, with naming, with the self-conscious act of declaring “this is a painting” right on the painting itself. It sits alongside the rest of the series the way a loud conversation sits alongside music — related, but doing something different with the same air.
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