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Published on August 07, 2023
When the art gets made, let the ideas take the wheel. When the continuous choices and problems arise in making a painting of an idea, the hum of feedback is generated. The idea makes the painting, then the painting starts terraforming the idea.
A large part of my artistic drive is to let my paintings polish my ideas, show me new possibilities and combinations and, in the best cases, transcend my original intentions. In my paintings, the concept is not complete until the art made has its own ideas to offer.
Bringing a painting forth from an idea means listening to the fuzzy resonance of thinking and making. Patterns develop and are then confounded, rules emerge and then need to be broken. Thus, making the art makes the possibilities of the idea clearer and more nuanced. The idea makes the artwork vibrate as it gets experimented on, played with, twisted, turned, expanded and deepened.
LeWitt’s attention to the role of the concept in driving the art also has a flipside to consider: how does enacting an idea develop it? Can a concept move unchanged into an artwork? An idea may create an art-making machine, but one that is strange and glitchy. An art-making idea is a weird and haunted machine that even when it stays close to its driving concept produces extra layers and meanings.