01/23/2026
Whenever I look at fake Po***cks or paintings that were directly influenced by Po***ck, what I notice is that there is no composition. The strokes are made in a sloppy way. The colors appear to be haphazardly chosen or too easily chosen. There is a decided lack of intensity. There is no real balance or contrast of values, and the painting as a whole looks totally arbitrary. What that means to me is that Po***ck's paintings are intense, carefully made, with colors that are carefully and not randomly chosen, and that they are very well composed, which is not at all what they look like.
I was talking to Tushar, the maintenance guy for the buildings. I forget what you call it, the people who take care of the building for the owners, which is Artscape Non-Profit Housing Incorporated. And we were talking about Cézanne and a lot of other artists, and I came to the conclusion, and I told him that what Cézanne discovered is that the eye, directed by the mind, seeks out intelligible motifs and moves from intelligible motif to intelligible motifs, which is the thing that I don't think even the Cubists understood. And in talking to him, it gave me an idea of how to construct a different kind of painting. It's odd, though, that it doesn't seem to matter how much control you exercise or how much chance you invite. There really is no surefire way of controlling the outcome, but only the spirit that goes into it. And that's when it occurred to me that Po***ck's web, which was the way Tushar interpreted what I was saying, was the most... properly advanced or proper advancement of the things that Cézanne discovered out of all the other artists I can think of, because at least he got the web, if not the details, the interstices, and the placement of them. But on the other hand, that argument is pretty questionable. A lot of people have commented that Po***ck's paintings were like synapses, and synapses are these connections in the brain, and I think those synapses are a pretty good metaphor, at least, for my notion of the intelligible motifs. In an article by Merleau-Ponty called Cézanne's Doubt, he wrote about Cézanne standing in a field for hours and his wife coming up to him and asking him, what the hell are you looking for? And he said, I'm looking for my motif. Merleau-Ponty didn't elaborate on that and left it hanging as if it were something that's still puzzling, but... It occurs to me that if what Cézanne meant was that he was looking for a motif of motifs, it makes perfect sense. He was looking at the landscape as if he were a photographer, because a photographer would look for a motif of motifs. But in painting, you would have to construct that. Where to begin? That's always the question. And to know where to begin, one has to envision the end. And then one has to envision the middle, or to put another way, how you get from the beginning to the end, which is the middle. And that's my thought for the day.
