ROBERT JESSUP
ARTIST’S STATEMENT
A long time is spent looking at a little wall of paint. This color next to that color. Slight vibrancies of hue. Smooth paint, raggedy paint. Edges hard and soft. There but not there. Always adjusting, adjusting, painting out, painting in. Always searching, working, for an ordering of these forms that feels right. And always the question: What does feeling right feel like? What does feeling right mean? When do you think you know?
This practice of painting is all about the struggle to make sense out of the chaotic jumble of capricious mark-making and visual noise with which the paintings always begin. As the work unfolds, you try to be fully present in each action and to be completely cognizant of and absorbed by the phenomena as it occurs. To completely pay attention and to forget preconceived ideas of how you think it is supposed to look.
You don’t know anything about painting away from painting. When the working is going well, you have remembered that.
Although the beginning moves may be wonderfully and delightfully random, they all are absolutely crucial to and determinative of how everything will unfold. Although you have no idea what exactly you will end up with until you get there, the work of painting pulls you along with seductive glimmers of possibilities, visions of lovely resolutions, plateaus of transcendence. Until things break down, what you thought would work doesn’t and you are forced to reach for another move that you haven’t thought of before and rethink the whole thing.
A painting doesn’t paint itself. It is the result of remembering and forgetting. Of planning and not planning. Of looking and looking and looking again. It is the result of work. The practice of painting is to come back to this work, over and over, without end.