Span
A point I mentioned earlier – the importance of enactment – refers to the idea that painting has an extraordinary capacity to manifest ideas. The poet Charles Olson, if we can return to him for a moment, insisted that, “[art of value] does not seek to describe but to enact.” Willem Dekooning made a remark once as well – he spoke about how oil paint was actually invented to paint flesh. He said something about how, as a thing in the world, it was more like flesh than anything else, referring to the textural quality of it and to the buildup of the many thin translucent layers in the paintings of the old masters – that the painting is not just a representation but it’s actually a manifestation of flesh.
Span is a good example of what I mean by enactment.
Each panel depicts a deformity; two fingers that are webbed or grown together – both sides are a set of webbed fingers. The dark areas of the painting were there in the original diagram. These are just spots where the ink gets clogged up in the irregularly shaped digits – but when I made it into painting it became this aggressive passage of gestural painting that joined or spanned the two panels of the diptych. The panels are joined together, physically, by this wad of painting in the same way that the webbed fingers that are depicted are joined together by flesh. So the painting approaches this situation in which it becomes or is an enactment of what it’s depicting.
-from the lecture, ”Specificity”
