This one I threw against the wall to see if it would stick. 8x10 pastel. Regarding John Berger, he can write insightfully about his own experience painting and drawing, and then he can write about art history, and art as property, and the end of landscape painting etc. , in a way the contradicts his own experience. Here's what he says about landscape painting: "Certainly there are no great modern landscapes comparable to those of the past...Cubism when it broke painting broke the landscape too." Fortunately, there's no inevitability about what one can paint. I know more because of what has preceded me, but that doesn't mean I can do less.
Here's what he says about his experience of drawing: "To draw is to look, examining the structure of appearances. A drawing of a tree shows, not a tree, but a tree-being-looked at. Whereas the sight of a tree is registered almost instantaneously, the examination of the sight of a tree (a tree-being-looked-at) not only takes minutes or hours instead of a fraction of a second, it also involves, derives from, and refers back to, much previous experience of looking. Within the instant of the sight of the tree is established a life-experience. This is how the act of drawing refuses the process of disappearances and proposes the simultaneity of a multitude of moments." This passage suggests the constant renewal and possibility of creativity, no matter what has already happened.
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