arnold leventhal
arnold leventhal
Like most painters, when I step up to the canvas, I hope to bring everything I’ve got – experience, technique, training, curiosity, a hunger to be swept up in the process, and a drive to set up and resolve a problem with my chosen medium. It is my intention that the dynamic of painting leads me beyond technique, beyond problem, to capture some essence of meaning. to bring views of the mind’s eye and the spirit’s yearning to some outer reality on the canvas. There for others to perceive and engage with. I seek to make art, as I find it in the world and find it made by others. to engage with and to create art as I know it and work things out on the canvas. I may want to paint a landscape or a portrait, to evoke a memory or an experience, to paint music or dance or anger or love.
I find pleasure in the visceral qualities of the medium. I like art that ‘drips and oozes’, that ‘slides across the wall’. The slashing and splashing, dripping and smearing, making order out of chaos, controlling the accident, are what delight me. The technical challenge of composition, the battle with colors and form, the conundrum of ‘what, how and why ’; this is how I search for meaning.
What can I hope to find within this discipline that has any value to you or me? There is no answer. There is only the question. Whatever meaning one finds in art, it is the same for the creator and for the observer. Neither point of view is more valid than the other. It is shared or it is nothing.
