Go Clear Painting

I started this painting with the feeling that, at least for a while, I was done painting the philosophical paintings accompanied by brief essays that I’d done of late. (I know, Hallelujah!) In fact, with a very different impulse, I was thinking I would take up the idea I once mentioned of becoming a tourist artist. When I said it awhile back, I was joking and intending it philosophically to explain how I was going to look at reality simply and without pretension the way a tourist artist might if his location was “Reality” instead of the Bahamas or Asbury Park. But now I really meant it. I thought if I could finish this painting in a few days (instead of the few months it did take me) I could do many more and sell them cheaply and live that way. But by the time I realized that it was taking too long for the idea to be feasible, my intention had already changed. I’d decided I was going to take up my graphic stories, dozens of which lay quietly in my filing cabinets, and this would be a practice, flexing again my narrative painting skills. But soon as I determined that to be my new motivation, a whole philosophical aspect of this painting opened up to my mind. (Oh no, not again!) I remembered one time coming out of my office, two of my coworkers with whom I was friendly, but who themselves were inseparable friends, were standing outside in the midst of a heated argument. They seemed to be expressing near contempt for each other and asked me, being an artist, to use my expertise to intervene. The one was asserting that this sculpture that can be seen right outside where I work was red and the other was insisting just as vehemently that it was orange. I tried to bring up the subjectivity of appearance and perception, but they were mostly interested in hearing confirmation that they were right. Now I have come to see that most of the movements in our mind, any experience we want more of than we’ve gotten, want it to continue, or any time we want something to stop because we don’t like it, or think it’s bad or wrong, anything we wish was different, which is almost everything, such mind movements are just like my co-workers argument, exactly as unreasonable and pointless. With this philosophical realization, I was going to name the painting “Neither Red Nor Orange Nor Both Nor Neither.” But at the last minute, something unexpected happened in the painting, and now it is called, “Go Clear.”