On Gerhard Richter's The Daily Practice of Painting

Notes from notes by a pretty spectacular painter and thinker--some selected windows into his thought process.  Interesting to note how as he grows older and thinks more, everything seems to become more coherent and optimistic.  The first part of the book was a kind of slog through the mud, but as I went on, everything began to make more sense and become very inspiring.

"Picturing things, taking a view, is what makes us human; art is making sense and giving shape to that sense.  It is like the religious search for God." 11

"To believe, one must have lost God.  To paint, one must have lost art." 15  --finding a sense of optimism from insecurity, improvement and jumping off from mistakes

"Have artists ever made objects remotely as large and as good as a lay person's garden?" 22 --perhaps the object itself is not the important thing, but the process, the 'making', the seeing

"Being able to do something is never an adequate reason for doing it." 23

"Paintings must be produced to a recipe.  The making must take place without inner involvement, like breaking stones or painting house fronts.  Making art is not an artistic act." 49  --here again the art itself seems subordinate to the planning that goes into it

"I steer clear of definitions.  I don't know what I want, I am inconsistent, noncommittal, passive; I like the indefinite, the boundless; I like continual uncertainty.  Other qualities may be conducive to achievement, publicity, success; but they are all outworn--as outworn as ideologies, opinions, concepts, and names for things." 58

"I felt like painting something beautiful." 64

Sight is somewhat equivalent to despair--it allows us to see, "precludes true reality" 64

"Painting as a kind of applied epistemology" 68  --fundamentally uncertain

"Art can be truly relevant only when it isn't directly employed to do a job." 69

"There is no such thing as Art for Art's Sake." 69

"You can't represent reality at all--what you make represents nothing but itself, and therefore is itself reality." 72

"Be a reaction machine, unstable, indiscriminate, dependent." 80 (REREAD) --be openminded, be yin

Goals: --"To try to do what can be done with painting...or...the continual attempt to picture ot myself what is going on." 92

"The pleasure of painting proves the necessity of it--all children paint, spontaneously.  Painting has a brilliant future, hasn't it?" 95

Abstract Art
"Seeing the unvisualizeable", making what has never been seen before accessible, exciting 100
But even realism ultimately does the same because the whole world is ultimately incomprehensible.
--like quote from Bilqis' book "The world is not comprehensible, but it is embraceable, through the embracing of one of its beings." Art is not about the comprehension, though the thought process is crucial--instead it is about the act of embracing.  And for art, embracing actually, paradoxically, means letting go.

"Art is the highest form of hope" 100

"Art is somewhere else" 106
part of "other" space, creative, undefined, unofficial, unknown, unbridled
like the internet, somewhere between here and there, between input and output
invisible but powerful

"Art does exist...as the loftiest yearning for Truth and happiness and Life or whatever you may call it; this is truly the most perfect form of our humanity." 111

"A constant is a continual variable." 111

"This kind of painting (about painting) is engaged in acquiring, working out, adumbrating a future for itself.  It's a future that has yet to arrive anywhere else, but in the picture it's celebrated in advance." 115 --art as foresightful, as an expression of happiness and optimism, a way of stretching across the limits of space and time

"Painting is intrinsically capable of giving visible form to our best, most human, most humane qualities." 118

"I have no motif, only motivation.  I believe that motivation is the real thing, the natural thing, and that the motif is old-fashioned, even reactionary (as stupid as the question about the meaning of life)" 119
Here reactionary is negative--the motif could represent a rut, a tried and true way of doing and seeing that, though it works, ought to be discarded for something newer, possibly better, more efficient and effective, though this is a risk.

"Pure painting is inanity, and a line is interesting only if it arouses interesting sensations." 119 --painting, and art itself, should have some kind of context

Openmindedness and flexibility:
"evolving, letting it come"
"passivity"
"genuine, richer, more alive, beyond my understanding" 119-20
ie in War and Peace--K not intervening, rather choosing right moment to place weight, calculated action/passivity--very Daoist

"I have nothing to say and I am saying it" Cage 122
"I know nothing, I can do nothing, I understand nothing, I knew nothing, nothing.  And all this misery does not even make me particularly unhappy." 122
Knowledge of a lack of knowledge is still a kind of knowledge
As in sailing or any activity--when you begin to really learn about something, you also realize how little you really know--like looking under surface of water and seeing other hidden 7/8 of an iceberg--your perspective is opened, though overwhelmed.

"I would prefer the normal comfort of not being too conscious." 125  I hope he is kidding.
Consciousness--"fear of death, of crossing frontiers"
Ambivalence about the human condition?

"I perceive our only hope--or our one great hope--as residing in art.  We must be resolute enough in promoting it.  ...This very fact could be the starting point of betterment, a key to the possibility of doing something." 125

"Art is an instrument, a method of getting at that which is closed to us...It is thus not only existential pleasure but utopia" 128

"The artist's productive act cannot be negated.  (It has to do) with the capacity to see and to decide what is to be made visible." 140

"Painting is not without an effect--I only want it to have more of one." 148

"The criteria of painting are conventions--and harmful ones, because they are ideologically defined.  They block enlightenment." 149

"Pictures that are about social coexistence...All I am trying to do in each picture is to bring together the most disparate and mutually contradictory elements, alive and viable, in the greatest possible freedom.  No Paradises." 166
--here "paradise" or the commonly held ideal, is not seen as a good thing--it is too common, too well known, too defined, too put together.  In some ways, static.  Instead, Richter wants something more vibrant, vital, dynamic, and its good will exist not in perfection, but in flexibility

Look at Magritte word pictures--defining something leads to limiting it?