Imagination, A Painter Painting Youth Abstractly
Morning Thoughts #99
Imagination, a painter; the halls I am working through, another tour. Too often, 'true story memories' remain unopened attachments. Looking back down a road I've never been, I've found my model again.
To live through and out mostly just pierces a canvas. I appreciate that it has been made its own, but forgive me for not displaying it in my personal grand hall. Another consummation for the attic, another for the basement. Something realized and truly known, thoroughly enough to be subsequently stored away. Sure and safe up there and down, I am so sure that it exists that I do not feel the need to confirm and reconfirm it. Yes, I rarely climb the rickety steps it takes to relive.
My favorite subject is plausible but unrealized possibility. Realistic possibility. Can I approach it close enough to sketch in detail but remain far enough away that its greater context remains the work's prominent light source? One step closer and I'll lose the ideal view needed to reproduce it on canvas, and I'll have to just grab as much as I can, close at a slippery hand, the simple fact rather than the intangible whole.
All of this so I can daydream like a museum-going tourist? I could live here, I whisper, meandering through the exhibits.
The imagination, when powerful enough, might reduce the need for lived experience. The curse (?) of foresight, the curse (?) of imagining a world apart from the world itself. The curse (?) of displaced realism. My fantasies disguise themselves autonomously. Not something of another type (another genre) but instead a competitor to reality, a start-up rival. Until, finally, there's no sense in connecting the imagined to the world itself. World away, every day, and then, when you descend to the here and now, it's as if you just got off a saucer.