Light, Transparency and Aniline Dyes

‘Light, Transparency and Aniline Dyes,’ I jot the phrase down in a notebook. ‘This is where I want to stay…,’ I think as I continue painting. ‘This is me!’ and I point to myself through drawing. Drawing, painting. Leaving a mark with my finger.

Art is pointing, I suppose. It is the key to the chest that opens the stone.

It is important to prepare the canvas before painting what you want to point toward. How can you make love without kissing first? The white canvas… I want to get to know you: spray paint, acrylic, inks, drops… of bleach, pastel chalk dust, and the finger. 200-grit, 300-grit, 1000-grit sandpaper. Colored pencils, markers, graphite grays, mirror, reflection. ‘This is so beautiful,’ it tells me again and again. ‘I want to stay here!’

Light, transparency, and aniline dyes, because everything is connected to everything. And art is that, I suspect. Walking and seeing a rainbow on the ground, with metallic sparkles in a stagnant puddle on the asphalt. The voices of the infinite universe immediately begin to resonate. Finding a butterfly-shaped hair clip on the ground, crushed and dirty. That stone in the river, in the sand by the sea—I point. Lying in bed and watching the theater of light cast by the bedroom blinds at night. And those images have to do with everything. And despite everything, that ‘everything’ is what there is, and within ‘what there is,’ there is everything.

Art is pointing.

I return to painting; we meet in what seems like a schizophrenic conversation. Cadmium yellow says ‘thank you,’ and it laughs, and seeing it amuses me. It says, ‘I can be whatever you want me to be.’ And I spring into action.