(On space placed atop an image.)

Recently I surprised myself by asserting (in a robust, big-voiced and tad-bit didactic way) my belief in the vision of Cézanne.

I write surprised because our conversation (my side and his side, to be fair) became quite heated. It wasn't until my throat, face and chest flushed with arguments I couldn't manage to surface into coherent sentences quickly enough that I realized how much I rely on Cézanne when I make multiple exposures. 

I will not bore you with a diatribe that, realistically perhaps, has more meaning to me as a sensation/memory than to you (or certainly to my arguing classmate) as good rhetoric. At the time it felt sorta good, albeit inadequate. 

Felt like vocally standing up for myself, which is not something I do for my own work very often.

Then looking at Vija Clemins again this morning, I could feel that same flush creeping not up the chest but inside it.

Here's what she says about one of her drawings at the MoMA:

I lived about seven blocks from the ocean, and I used to go down and inspect it in the evening, making photographs, contemplating, making films. I had also been doing drawings in my studio. I had a realization that the surface of the ocean was somehow like the surface of the paper and that I could combine the images and have the image and the drawing unfold together.

I really didn't fudge around or erase or smear. The graphite went on quite clear. I usually started actually at the right hand corner and moved straight up, like a kind of record of a double consciousness. A consciousness of the surface of the paper and also the surface of the image. It's about a kind of double reality of seeing what's there in a most ordinary way, a flat piece of paper and then seeing the double reality of an image that implies a different kind of space which is laid on top of the other image, but which really isn't there.

It's been many years since I was satisfied by a photograph that wasn't just a photograph but also about photography.

Or about vision. About how the eyes work. About the infinite and infinitely slight amount of time it takes to see an image.

(Especially, especially, especially when it comes to what I make.)

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Read/See the Vija Clemins work from the MoMA: here