The model is not a muse. The painting is not an image.
Matisse: A Way of life in the South of France text by Gilles Plazy
He did not have the haste of the impressionists who chain the canvas to the subject, because rather than representing something, he was engaged in creating paintings, which is no mean feat. A painting is not an image, it is a new, autonomous being, which encapsulates the emotions and sensitivity of the painter and communicates them again to the spectator.
Karin Cope
“Painting after Gertrude Stein”
Diacritics
Vol. 24, No. 2/3, Critical Crossings (Summer – Autumn, 1994)
A model is not a muse, then, but the name of a force or problem that animates a particular body of work. Such models are legible not simply as the traces of “life” on work (as if work “confessed” to a life somehow separate form it) but in and as works or regimes of work themselves.
The painting is not an image. The model is not a muse.
And so for day 2571
27.12.2013