A challenge....

Bloody hell tom you don't half love challenging my powers of concentration by shoving everything up at once.

First of all i'm gonna quote francis bacon again and say "if something can be explained in words it isn't worth painting". this is the biggest trump card painting has over all other art forms. unfortunately it seems to now mean that a painting can be deliberately obtuse, indecipherable for the sake of it, or that the artist doesn't need to contemplate its own meaning, this is far from the truth and it leads to neanderthals making claims that this thus makes painting easy. the difficulty i think is in understanding what we need to pin point in terms of understanding our own practice, how do we set ourselves along the journey of improving our work without overindulging intellectualisms that in actuality hinder the painting? communication is the first intention for all art forms, as painters i think we have to start from a very loose stand point, something which is simple, eg what is it about this image which intrigues me? Now, what next? Do we begin to ask why and what? I'm beginning to think no, perhaps this was a lingering misconception from studentdome, the need to over-vocabularise every little nuance (I'm thinking back to my ridiculous 30min end of year talk here). A more important question may be how? Painting is at heart a craft, and craft is built on the development of technique, painting being one of the more complex crafts incorporates a range of techniques. The next question we need to ask is, why has this bit of painting made me happy/unhappy? By asking this question we are attempting to refine what it is we are painting about without entering into the limit-defining belly of the talkybeast. In essence, we are listening to our feelings rather than our learning. when we begin to ascribe specifying words to an action, we are actually taking the easy route out because we are reaching defined dead ends, and these are satisfying because it makes us feel we've done something clever, we've completed something. but painting doesn't have dead ends, it isn't a narrative with a beginning middle and end, it just simply is, and this 'is' is open ended and mysterious. As with peter doig, you may be able to look back over his whole oeuvre and see a progressing personal narrative, but in a single image you do not. by asking how does this make me happy, we are trying to find a certain truth to our own practice and through that, to our own personal make-up and perhaps even to a truth about about the society we exist in. if we are successful we may just be able to peel away one of those pesky veils of untruth that cloud our everyday existence.
does this mean that when a painting is finished it is ok to analyse your subjective intent?