My painting XXIV

Early May 2008

Although I shall still put 'My Painting' at the head of these instalments in the biography of a picture I have, at long last, found a title for it. Of the many words that have been churning around in my head two have come to rest together and seem to sum up what I think I am trying to do. QUANTUM POETICS is a juxtaposition which may even contain or conceal an unexpected truth. Unfortunately 'quantum' is a term much thrown about these days and needs to lassoo a tough qualifying companion to validate its use.

It would not take long to write out what little of the little that is understood of quantun dynamics I myself understand. Luckily however, in my own world, thought is often pictorial and imagery occupies the place of verbal or mathematical analysis.

Daunting explanations in print and conversation, while indeed enabling me to have a partial grasp of actualities, generate at the same time more freely formed embodiments in visual terms. These often link to the intuitions of the past which, in pattern and design, for 70,000 years have expressed things that were not ripe for use or available to knowledge.

Thus I am reminded again of how much human thought has been secreted over millennia in the rich resource of ornament. It was there for example that abstraction waited patiently for the twentieth century to discover and realise its riches.

Perhaps an imaged response might even have a modest purpose. What it can do is to try to articulate a part of that field of wonder that recent science has revealed, and which the art of the past had fragmentarily intuited. This picture is but one hesitant attempt at such a non verbal commentary, a contribution to the beginning of a poetics of quantum theory.