Life of a painting

"How do you arrive to the work?"

Charlott Weisse: I think arriving to the work can be even more important than finishing a work. It’s a state that you’re in. A mental space that allows you to question. Wait, I’ll start again.

G: Just take your time… Is it like, let’s say, approaching to a person?

C: For me, it is the question of from which place do you paint? Where does your voice come from? What do you want to say? What is important for you? What kind of an honesty do you put in? It is in relation to the other question: What does a painting do to the others? Also to yourself... Painting is so revealing. Not frightening, but it’s sometimes hard to be really honest when painting, especially if you would like to break borders, get out of the comfort zone. My work, for example, deals a lot with personal narrations. Often they can be encrypted or fragmented. I find interesting what Francis Bacon tells about his work. He’s talking a lot about a certain distinction between figuration and figural.

He doesn’t paint figurative, but goes towards the purely figural, through abstraction and extraction .  Almost literally he says that "some paint“ (talking about the figural) acts immediately on the nervous system and other paint tells you the story via a long diatribe through the brain". How is painting more direct? Back to the question: it is also how you listen to the work. You arrive to something that also takes you further from that point. Painting is something that is very active and performative, but at the same time you have to really listen to the work. It’s like a ping-pong game that requires concentration. In a way, you think through the work… I don’t know if I’m too vague about the answers.

And… the life of a painting… It’s beautiful that Varda wrote down this question. It means that a painting has a life of its own. A painting is born, when an idea is born. For a while you accompany this painting and when you are finished with working on, it is free. I don’t know who said that but we talked about this philosophical idea of existence in relation to perception. Something only exists as long as we see or acknowledge. The thing dies as soon as it is not regarded any more.