"It looks empty, but I see fullness there"

School has started and at first I was pleased to have a routine again, but after a week of not stepping into the studio, I can feel that old, dull ache creeping back. I took some time to look for inspiration and found this Art21 video and it is AMAZING! Who is this man? The paintings. His words. I never heard of him, but am I glad to have found Rackstraw Downes.

For the series I'm working on, I've moved away from abstract and back to representational. I enjoy the puzzle of putting back together what I see into a painitng. I like imagining a story as I paint and expressing the details in the tiny strokes of my brush. However, in the back of my mind, I'm worried that representational is amateurish.

But Rackstraw Downes says otherwise and I think his explanation so beautifully captures the complexity of painting what we see,

"There is no solution to the representation of the world. As soon as you put a 3 dimensional world, with movement onto a 2 dimensional surface it becomes a metaphor. Perspective is an attempt to standardize the metaphor of the depiction of space." (I paraphrased a bit what he said)

There are more words of wisdom in the entire Art 21 video, but if you just want a taste you can watch the youtube video below.