SAM FEINSTEIN
speaking about art:
Creativity is spirituality looking for a form. It is a quest of the human spirit to find somehow a way of flowing with the universal pulse that runs through all things.
Modern science teaches that “when the so-called reality of visible substance is reduced to its smallest components, only movement remains. Mass and energy are as one … Nothing ever stands still. Nothing is ever by itself. Everything moves into everything else. The organization of a work of art should be such that it ties you to a sense of the eternal, ongoing rhythmic, pulsing process that is life itself. If it is simply an imitation of the actual, it is a lie. We don’t paint flowers. We paint flowering.”
I have had to distinguish nature from naturalism. The naturalistic aspects of a tree are the trunk, the branches, the twigs, the buds, the leaves. The reality of a tree, Nature in its essence, is the thrust of life that goes from the roots up through the branches into the leaves. The principle of life is what is IN the tree that gives it life. The artist’s task is to convert from a landscape to a paintscape, with every element clarified—to make out of it a majesty, an aristocracy.
The canvas is not a passive carrier of appearances from nature. It is a nature in itself, a vibrant being, alive in its own right. The virgin whiteness of its surface becomes, with the first contact by the artist, a resilient, gesturing anatomy.
How do pictorial forms become energized equivalents for solid forms? They are built out of units of pictorial energy: colors. Each color is like an atom in the fabric of pictorial form.
A brick wall is made of bricks; a painting is made out of color-forms. Each piece of a painting is like a piece of a mosaic where each piece is critical.
You are like a piano tuner, adjusting each note until it is right. It’s not a matter of tinkering with it. It’s a matter of living in the realm until you sense what it wants to be.
These paintings are conceived to project their own expression, to radiate a specific presence… They are optical structures composed to touch the human spirit, to turn a rectangle into an evocation.
