Thought on the 'function' of painting.

Last night I realised that romantic idealism has for a number of years hindered my views on the approach a painting needs to take in order to fulfill its function. My end goes, primarily, are the same as they always have been. It is the means by which I beleive we get a viewer there which has changed.

I believed that beauty could be enough. That it could provide a temporary release from reality, acting as some kind of antidote, the very antithesis to the everyday. Such an approach actually perpetuates the problem. It ends up discovering a decorative aesthetic which at most provides a brief and pleasant distraction. It becomes another empty glimpse in what is generally a fast paced life without time or attention given to anything. We cannot aloow paintings role to be merely an empty vessel of sensation.

We need to be more aggresive. Painting needs to provide an interuption. It needs to disrupt from the monotony of tangible reality. I am not talking shock or sensation. im talking about something more subtle but which holds someone for longer than a split second of admiration. It needs to make them want to dig deeper, to look longer. Only then can any windows to a deeper experience be opened. Only then can any sensation or aesthetic become more than a pictureque glimpse. We need to make them questions themselves, the paintings, their relation tot he painting. It needs to be excessable but frustratingly never a clsoed door, to keep posing visual and philosophical potential which they don't fully feel they can get to the bottom of. It needs to alst and then stay with them.

All very obvious, but something I have been ignoring.