Studio Tangents: The Flat Truth

What I watched this week

Gerhard Richter Painting — Corinna Belz, 2011. Richter pulling a squeegee the width of his body across a canvas three times his height. The whole film is watching a man make decisions about marks, then unmake them, then make them again. I think the takeaway from this movie is that the most dramatic tool in the room is the one actually doing the work. Usually it's flat.
Like Richter's work?

Yeah, I'm no fan. This is why galleries and "high art" (sponsored, overpriced, elitist) are failing today. We are done with squeegees. 

But I also did not fall in love with the flat brush this life around. There was never any epiphany. No moment when a flat brush arrived in my life the way the Isabey mop arrived, or the way Prussian Blue arrived some winters ago.

The flat brush has no personality, but it has a function.

And that function — laying even washes across large areas, pulling pigment from one edge of the paper to the other without interruption, building the sky— is the work that everything else depends on. The interesting marks sit on top of what the flat brush made. The wet-on-wet bloom happens inside the wet field, the flat brush prepared. You cannot see the flat brush's work in the finished painting, which is exactly the condition of its success. It constructs the opportunity but is not it.

When a painting fails for me [...]