"Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees"

[fiefoe]

The impeccable straight-arrow logic of Irwin's artistic progress:

• Imagery for me constituted representation, "re-presentation," a second order of reality, whereas I was after a first order of presence.
• He realized that the straight line itself was the most energy-efficient, the least Rorschachable gesture.
• [Kierkegaard:] Here we have the principle of limitation, the onlt saving principle in the world. The mire you limit yourself, the more fertile you become in invention.
• Boredom's a great way to break that. All your illusions, aspirations, everything just drains off. 
• He wanted to suspend such conventions as much as possible, to hold them in abeyance, to bracket them, as it were, in order to consider them and their implications more directly.
• "All my activities after those line paintings, are a result of how those paintings taught me to look at the world. .. My posture is not one of focus but rather of attention.
  
• There is a strain in the Jewish mystical tradition that asserts that there exist questions larger than the sum of their answers,
• Now, I'm not anti performance, but I find it very precarious for a culture only to be able to measure performance and never to be able to credit the questions themselves.

__ "When people talk about how to read a Renaissance painting ," Irwin explains, "they talk about how you should go from the point of most focus, which is the key figure, and then run down the arm and pick up the drape of the gown down to the floor and up the pillar; you should actually move through the painting, from the most important to the least and then right back to the most. Through the painter's sophisticated compositional technique, you are brought around by way of the flow of the lines, the dapple of the colors, the hierarchy of the subject ideas-all of these things working in tandem and sometimes even in counterpoint."
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