As most artists know, inspiration is a grievously fickle thing. When present, it can imbue a painting with vitality and relevance; once it departs, the piece becomes as mundane and irritating a reminder as, for example, the bathroom sink that needs to be bleached out.
When this happens, the artist faces a crisis like that of a doctor: the patient is languishing on the operating table; is there any way of reviving it? It’s too easy to abandon the project, now that the connection with the painting has been broken. And too often, rekindling an interest feels like starting a fire with nothing but two fingers.
My painting “died” the other day, so I picked up an old issue of Art in America to find an artist whose work attracts me. Without having to look further than the inside front cover, I discovered Jean-Pierre Riopelle, a Canadian painter who used a gestural “all-over” approach, while maintaining an elegant formal organization to his paintings.
Crowded with complicated, overlapping forms, the paintings reflect strife and aggression at first glance. Riopelle’s technique varies: sometimes he drags long paths through the paint, and other times he chips and pushes away at it with short, feverish strokes of the palette knife. The latter technique yields an effect like that of a closeup of crystals in a microfiched sheet of rock. The myriad facets of seemingly solid narratives are brought forth in stunning, rainbow-hued array. In this sense, Riopelle’s canvases aptly express the kaleidoscopic chaos of a rapidly modernizing world.
In spite of their sense of entanglement and conflict, these paintings have an undeniable celebration of richness—of the medium as well as the entire, splintered prism of modernity itself.
The ambivalence in Riopelle’s paintings points to a question that every individual faces: will you forsake the world or will you embrace it in all its wounded glory? Likewise, the question of abandoning a painting or returning to it is a crucial decision that an artist faces every day.
I loooooooove this- the painting and your reference to the doctor/ patient relationship. I might even argue that the roles are easily reversed, the artist waiting helplessly on the table at times, trying to be healed or “found’ by inspiration.