This is a strange love. It’s a love that isn’t about me, or us. It leaves a dull kind of aching inside of me because I want something I’ll never have. But in the end it’s about you. It’s about you and it’s about finding something so beautiful I’m sure I’ll never really find it again; enlightening because I know it’s out there and yet crushing because it is all downhill from here.
Well that’s a little pessimistic, now isn’t it?
You were getting ready for your exhibition today, and I helped you carry some of your paintings downstairs. And when I looked at the collection of your work, all laid out before me I was stopped with a sudden, rising, sinking sensation that I had might as well stop for good, because this was what I wanted to be doing with my art. This was exactly what I wanted my paintings to be.
And they aren’t.
Yours are.
And you don’t want me. Or even if you did, all my pining and my fawning have surely changed that by now.
In every possible, rational sense of giving up I have abandoned this chase. In every irrational way I’m still trying to let this all go. It’s going so slooooowly.
I think I might be finally coming to understand why I float so easily among genres and styles in my painting. A girlfriend asked me today – a girlfriend who happens to be a painter as well – what I was trying to do, what I wanted to make, thta I must know, then, if I’d found it in what he paints.
I want to paint beauty and wonder and grace. And you find these things just as well in portraits as in still-life as in abstract expressionism as in imaginary desert-scapes in dreams.
Tonight that almost makes sense.