Color
(Delayed Prejudice)
In Nihil, color isn’t planned or used strategically. There should be no conscious color preferences to make a painting in one color instead of another. Color must be incidental, contingent on a larger process, in which the palette coming forward is revealed more than designed. The assumption is that color, like anything else, will reveal itself as necessary to the overall feeling of the work.
The artwork’s palette can only come about idiosyncratically. Here are some possibilities:
First, it’s possible to use a preset pattern, though not one designed by me. Let’s say red equals A, orange B, yellow C, and so on. If a certain piece responds to a tintinnabuli composition by Arvo Pärt, I can reference specific notes via color and layer them in the same way he layers aurally. In that way, I am forced to respond to whatever this palette gives me over several layers. The bigger the mess, the bigger the opportunity to improvise. In Nihil, I can never know in advance what color the final piece will appear to be.
All drawings used as reference for paintings must be black and white or monochromatic. This is to make it impossible to preplan a palette. In Nihil, I cannot mix color to match an already existing color.
The tubes of painting in my painting drawers should be rearranged each time, randomly, or according to a musical pattern. When it becomes required to use a certain color, there is no option to deny it. Sometimes the color is an utter inconvenience to the progress made in a work. The color will sometimes be so inconvenient as to seem to “ruin” the pattern that I seemed to be working toward. In trusting the process, however, I find again and again that the more inconveniences that occur in the process, the richer the surface eventually becomes. In Nihil, the only color mistake I can make is to lose faith in the process. Trusting the process, I relax into the inconvenience and accept that it has something to teach me.
When it comes to the small objects, all color used in them must be leftover from previous palettes. Because of this constraint, it typically takes months to make the smallest works, and because I have little choice in the color I use, it’s unlikely that the new color layer will work very well with the color underneath. That’s how they become so thick. I just keep adding “bad colors” until, somehow, it arrives.
This is why Nihil doesn’t really mean “nothing.” If, historically, a specific color is thought to have a specific meaning, then, if I’m not careful, I begin to believe it. In not forming or verbalizing an intellectual belief, a kind of valence of unconscious suspicions is expressed in the colors to which I default. The “nothing” of Nihil is in the imposed constraint, to remove intentional emotional manipulation or meaning-making from color and, by implication, to remove latent ideological underpinnings all too convenient to my sense of identity. Enforcing what are ultimately arbitrary methods for creating a palette requires the question of belief to be asked freshly each time and to make visible the unconscious tendencies which quietly rumble beneath every action.