Pithy Phrases

“Painting is all about painting yourself up against a wall. What’s important is what you do then.”

(--approximate quote from Frank Stella)

When I am stuck, which is a lot of the time, phrases from my teachers come into my head, tools that help me analyze the problems I am looking at. So, it really helps me to take a huge, complicated concept and encapsulate it into a phrase, the pithier the better. Sure, art is a “right-brained” activity, creative, non-verbal, existing in the flow of the moment; but without analytical tools painting would sooner or later become boring and repetitive.