On to something

Faith

Steven LaRose, Arrangement 2 2003
Oil on stone, 6 x 6"
(click here for more)

In 2003, I was painting with oil on squares of polished marble, granite, and exotic stones that I gathered from the sink cut-outs of various job site dumpsters. I painted and painted and really thought I was on to something until I read the Janet Lloyd translation of Hubert Damisch's A Theory of /Cloud/ TOWARD A HISTORY OF PAINTING find it here
In it, Hubert bursts my bubble and locks me in!

Of course, these aren't Hubert's words but he is quoting someone else's translation of Leonardo da Vinci's:
How to expand the mind and conduct various inventions:

"I shall not fail to include among these precepts a new discovery, an aid to reflection, which, although it seems a small thing and almost laughable, nevertheless is very useful in stimulating the mind to various discoveries. This is: look at walls splashed with a number of stains or stones of various mixed colours. If you have to invent some scene, you can see there resemblances to a number of landscapes adorned in various ways with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, great plains, valleys, and hills. Moreover, you can see various battles, and rapid actions of figures, strange expressions on faces, costumes, and an infinite number of things, which you can reduce to good, integrated form. This happens thus on walls and varicoloured stones, as in the sound of bells, in whose pealing you can find every name and word you can imagine.
Do not despise my opinion when I remind you that it should not be hard for you to stop sometimes and look into the stains on the walls, or the ashes of a fire, or clouds, or mud, or like things, in which, if you consider them well, you will find really marvellous ideas. The mind of the painter is stimulated to new discoveries, the composition of battles of animals and men, various compositions of landscapes and monstrous things and similar creations, which may bring you honour, because the mind is stimulated to new invetions by obscure things."

And before Leo da "V" there was Song Di, a Chinese painter from the eleventh century:

"Choose an old, ruined wall, spread over it a piece of white silk. Then, every morning and evening, look at it until at last you can see the ruin through the silk, its bumps, levels, zig-zags, and cracks, fixing them in your mind and your eyes. Make the bumps into your mountains, the deepest parts your rivers, the hollows your ravines, the cracks your streams, the lightest parts your closest points, the darkest parts your most distant points. Fix all that deeply within you and soon you will see men, birds, plants and trees, and figures flying or moving between them. Then you can use your brush as you will. And the result will be a heavenly, not a man-made thing."


Well, a couple days ago, I went to a soapstone quarry and got myself some chunks of soft rock. This stuff is totally addictive and many things are starting to make sense to me. Here is a brief turn-around video of where my first exploration is headed. I figure that the piece is about halfway done but I couldn't resist posting something because I am really enjoying myself and there is nobody else in my studio that I can nudge with my elbow and say "Whoa. . . check it out".