An Attempt not to Paint a White Monochrome
   

The work I am preparing has slight conceptual grounds, but mostly it is a painting, and an abstract one
at that. It is therefore difficult to say much about it. There is no narration to retell, no hidden or double
meanings, no symbolism ... The only way I can talk about it is to explain its formal structure trough the
conceptual frame I have been preoccupied with; the concept being, roughly, not to paint a white monochrome.
Many paintings have been done. I like to paint. There is little left to be discovered. And discoveries seem
much easier once they have been discovered. I justify my painting activity trough trying out modernist
inventions in painting and thus bringing them forward, into today, contextualizing them, making contemporary
art of them.
In my previous piece I was trying to paint a white monochrome. Trying, I say. It is not easy for someone
who is an abstract expressionist at heart to paint in a minimal manner. But after 140 attempts I came
close. I painted an almost entirely white painting and I could still call it a painting.
In the work for the Konsthallen show, I am trying to move away from the white monochrome, as far
away as I can manage.
The piece I am working on will have a title. An Attempt Not to Paint a White Monochrome.
The painting the piece will consist of will also have a title. It will be engraved on a brass plaque and attached
to the canvas. What is this life if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare.
The title adds another level to the work. The white monochrome is for a painter about being minimal
with means, about using little elements and making them sufficient. For a viewer, it should be about the
richness of the scarceness of elements. The title attached to a white monochrome would lessen the monochrome’s
self sufficiency, it would undermine it, hide it behind something that it is not. Attaching a title
to a monochrome would be as if not daring to let people see the painting’s gist. The title would interfere
and disturb, it would hide the whiteness, the edges, the expression of each brush stroke, the Painting.
Although it is extremely interesting and amusing since it was done in the 19th century, a monochrome
called First Communion of Anaemic Young Girls in the Snow is to a painter mere illustration, or a conceptual
piece, but not a full grown painting. Had this painting not had a title, art history might have been different
today.
To not paint a monochrome as much as I can, I have to paint a piece with a title.
My painting will be one to be looked at for a certain time. It will demand attention. It will want people
to stand and look. Or sit and look. Or at the least make somebody now and then ponder about time for
a second. Time in general perhaps as well, but it is time in a gallery that I have in mind here. So besides
the painting, the piece will consist of comfortable chairs. People should have a chance to see this piece.
It looks best if seen from an armchair. I want clear, though preferably discreet, directions as of how the
painting should be looked at. Armchair(s) seem sleekest and clearest solution.
To not paint a white monochrome as much as I can, I have to use plenty of colours and either frame the
painting or unstrech it.
As I was putting so much thought and attention into the paintings’ sides and edges when trying to paint
a monochrome and since I do not have enough money to hide the painting’s sides under a frame, I find
it an adequate point of departure here to decide upon using only the painting’s front flat and literally take
away the extras that would ordinarily form a painting. .
By minimizing the narration and the colours one maximizes the three dimensional object-hood of a
painting. Exclusion of elements heightens importance of that which is left. The painting stops being a flat
surface covered by paint and becomes a 3d object, the edges of which are as important as its front, even if
left untouched; now a painting is a sum of all that a painting is made of. Everything that is left matters.
At the monochromes opposite however, it is the flat of the painting that matters (unless one chooses to
paint the edges as well. I will write about a painting composition that has its contours on the front side).
When painterly elements are plenty, the sides loose their significance. They might be there though, they
are formed by stretchers that support a painting that requires a very flat, stretched surface, and they might
make the painting pretty or common or proper in terms on which we are used to look at paintings –
stretched paintings are a uniform norm. Since we have been served them for centuries we imagine that
that is how a finished painting should look like. I think it is a sane form this though, it makes a lot of
sense and I think it is one of those conventions where one can easily understand why they have become
so widely accepted and used. It is however possible to paint without stretchers, and just as possible to look
at paintings that are hanging freely. A piece of canvas, un-stretched and fragile is revealing the canvas’s
soft nature – it is not a stiff material this, canvas is soft, wrinkly, lively. Painters know that, and it is not
wrong to use this characteristic, and to show it. It is not a novelty either; it just is not most frequently
met.
When painting a two dimensional surface covered by paint and not putting any thought in painting’s
edges, to have a nice boxy painting-object is not fully justified for me any more. If I wanted to have my
canvas on stretchers I would have to use the frame, to cover the sides that would have nothing to say and
to frame in the area viewers should look at. Modernism took all the frames away to point out that paintings
are not windows into other realities, but, paintings. It was quite a “discovery” and a big step further.
Since frames have been taken away quite some painters noticed the edges and used them in their works.
So now we know how to look at paintings in a new way, from left and right and from underneath and
from above, we look at whatever we can get our eyes on, beyond the front flatness. But sometimes there
is nothing there. Sometimes the painter did not care about the edges, and yet they are there, and we look
at them and we see some unintentional and boring drips. And by now I think we all know that paintings
are not windows. The removed frame should perhaps be reconsidered once again, and perhaps returned
to the painting, if for no other reason than to mask away the insignificant, the disturbing, to shift focus
on to the painting that a painter painted.
The other option is to only leave what there is of the painting, the painterly surface, to remove the
stretchers, thus sides – and that leaves me with an un-stretched canvas.
Due to the enormous costs for framing a nine meter long painting I decide for the latter.
Finally, the painting consists of three pieces tied together by ribbons. When I started working on this
piece I thought I was painting a trilogy so I cut the canvas. Later I changed my mind and inspired by the
upside down turned cow in what was previously my favorite café then called Minimal (now by new owner
decorated in an all but minimal manner), I have tied the pieces together with black satin ribbon drawn trough
golden rings. As for the small rosettes that round up the stitches, they are inspired by the woman in me.