LYOTARD’S DANCE of PAINT

I recently experienced a difficult creative block, which led me to switch my painting medium from acrylic to watercolor. For many years I had poured acrylic paint as part of a processoriented method of making paintings. That is to say, the use of the human hand was minimized, the paintings allowed to “grow” on their own. But I had become bored with this method and felt limited by my technique. My question became: what to paint? At some point I turned to Gerhard Richter’s paintings and JeanFrançois Lyotard’s writings on the painters Christiaan Karel Appel and Sam Francis. I began to see new possibilities and directions. Taken in tandem, the works of Richter and Lyotard helped me reaffirm my belief in the importance of color and gesture and hence the viability of painting as a medium in a hyperdocumented information age.