Robert James Renwick
Fine Art
925A Paseo del Pueblo Sur #22
Taos, NM 87571
ph: 575 586 1040
painter
By way of explanation
Matisse once said, "You want to be a painter? First of all you must cut out your tongue because your decision has taken away from you the right to express yourself with anything but your brush." He went on to contradict himself by writing volumes on his own work .
I can relate to this; ideally the work speaks for itself. This is not an ideal world.
All is contradiction. It seems that any single answer to any question must be incomplete at best and a lie at worst.
1. My aim is to convey my experience.
2. I know that this is impossible.
3. Knowing this is not going to stop me trying.
( In a way it is the very impossibility of this task that makes it attractive.)
If by painting I can help others to see the extraordinary in the commonplace then that is enough.
I hope that my work might prompt people to question the way they see the world around them.
When it comes down to it, I paint what I want to see. I paint for myself.
It is this tension between wanting to communicate with others and at the same time having to work without thought of what anyone might think that is at the root of all I do. As Shakespeare wrote:
"Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all and thus the native hue of resolution is sicklied oer with the pale cast of thought."
When I was young I was lucky enough to spend a lot of time around the Mediterranean. It is no coincidence that most of the painters I admire worked in that part of the world . To list a few: Cezanne, Morandi, Matisse, Modigliani, Giacometti, Miro’, Braque and, of course Picasso, "To copy others is necessary. To copy oneself is pathetic."
Bonnard said "what is beautiful in nature is not always beautiful in painting". I believe it is this sentiment, among others, that led these painters to 'abstract' from nature rather than to simply copy its outward appearance.
Of course there is a place for pure representation. Cameras do this best and super realism is more a comment on photography than anything else. Seeing is not a tidy business.
I am more interested in representing the experience at the core of contemplating objects in nature.
The paintings begin, to borrow a phrase from Robert Motherwell, as "a series of mistakes".
The way forward lies in corrections made intuitively. This process goes on and is never finished, only abandoned at the right time.
When it all grows at once the piece might work. Ultimately it is all a matter of chance.
I can relate to this; ideally the work speaks for itself. This is not an ideal world.
All is contradiction. It seems that any single answer to any question must be incomplete at best and a lie at worst.
1. My aim is to convey my experience.
2. I know that this is impossible.
3. Knowing this is not going to stop me trying.
( In a way it is the very impossibility of this task that makes it attractive.)
If by painting I can help others to see the extraordinary in the commonplace then that is enough.
I hope that my work might prompt people to question the way they see the world around them.
When it comes down to it, I paint what I want to see. I paint for myself.
It is this tension between wanting to communicate with others and at the same time having to work without thought of what anyone might think that is at the root of all I do. As Shakespeare wrote:
"Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all and thus the native hue of resolution is sicklied oer with the pale cast of thought."
When I was young I was lucky enough to spend a lot of time around the Mediterranean. It is no coincidence that most of the painters I admire worked in that part of the world . To list a few: Cezanne, Morandi, Matisse, Modigliani, Giacometti, Miro’, Braque and, of course Picasso, "To copy others is necessary. To copy oneself is pathetic."
Bonnard said "what is beautiful in nature is not always beautiful in painting". I believe it is this sentiment, among others, that led these painters to 'abstract' from nature rather than to simply copy its outward appearance.
Of course there is a place for pure representation. Cameras do this best and super realism is more a comment on photography than anything else. Seeing is not a tidy business.
I am more interested in representing the experience at the core of contemplating objects in nature.
The paintings begin, to borrow a phrase from Robert Motherwell, as "a series of mistakes".
The way forward lies in corrections made intuitively. This process goes on and is never finished, only abandoned at the right time.
When it all grows at once the piece might work. Ultimately it is all a matter of chance.
925A Paseo del Pueblo Sur #22
Taos, NM 87571
ph: 575 586 1040
painter
