Portrait of Becky

In Selected Essays and Articles: The Look of Things, (Harmondsworth and NY, Penguin, 1972, on p. 165, John Berger says, "A line, an area of tone, is not really important because it records what you've seen, but because of what it will lead you to see. Following up its logic in order to check its accuracy, you find confirmation or denial in the object itself, or in your memory of it. Each confirmation or denial brings you closer to the object, until finally you are, as it were, inside it, the contours of what you have drawn no longer marking the edge of what you have seen, but the edge of what you have become."

A second image of Becky in its first and second days of painting, with more figuring out to go through, reminds me again of Berger's quote as he continues to write, "Another way of putting it would be to say that each mark you make on the paper is a stepping stone from which you proceed to the next, until you have crossed your subject as though it were a river."




I think here's the magic. I could look at you today and see you one way, but tomorrow, I'd find another you...it's like rummaging through your favorite pictures and coming across the one where you say, "Wow, I wouldn't have known that was you!" and then you get to add that 'wow' into all the other expressions and visions you've accumulated over the years, and the more you build from that foundation, the more you feel like you're finally getting to something deeper and richer, but only over time, only over multiple searches, and only after the 'wows' of yesterday and today. Drawing and painting make you crawl through the everyday as if you're a newborn and you don't know much of anything...there's no quick answers, there's plenty of falling down and walking backwards, but at some point, you get a little sturdier and start to walk.