Rivers forming treelike figures on the desert of Baja California, Mexico. Photo by Adrina Franco.
(Source: whosnakeanthony)
“You don’t just start painting. You have to sit for a while and get some kind of mental idea in order to go and make the right moves. And you need a whole bunch of materials at the ready. For example, you need to build framework stretchers for the canvas. It can take a long time just to prepare something to paint on. And then you go to work. The idea just needs to be enough to get you started because for me, whatever follows is a process of action and reaction — it’s always a process of building and then destroying. And then — out of this destruction, discovering a thing and building on it. Nature plays a huge part in it. Putting different materials together like baking something in sunlight or using one material that fights another material causes its own organic reaction. Then it’s a matter of sitting back and studying it and studying it and studying it and suddenly you find you’re leaping up out of your chair and going in and doing the next thing. That’s action and reaction.
But if you know you’ve got to be somewhere in a half hour, there’s no way you can achieve that. So the art life means a freedom to have the time for the good things to happen. There’s not always a lot of time for other things.”
David Lynch, “The Art Life”, in Catching The Big Fish
