“Of course I doubt myself all the time, but I must obey my instincts, they are the only things I can trust. I was thinking last night as I sat by the stove reading the journals of last year how suspicious I am of whatever “procedure” I’m involved with at a certain period in painting. When I was working from “master” reproductions I was afraid I’d never do anything original. When I was painting from photographs I was afraid I’d never work from nature again. When the work was more agitated I hated its “expressionism” and wanted more calm. And now that it’s more calm I fear it’s not emotional enough. When I take a long time on a picture and struggle a great deal I hate the agony and suspect I’m over-working. And when it comes easily I fear facility.”

• The Journals of Grace Hartigan, 1951–1955
• The Painter and the Poet: Grace Hartigan and Frank O’Hara
• Rules of Abstraction

Continuing on my New York School reading binge, I recently finished The Extreme of the Middle: Writings of Jack Tworkov. Superbly edited by Mira Schor, this collection of his writing, from published works to more private musing in journals and letters, comes highly recommended.

• Fever Charts: On Jack Tworkov

• Jack Tworkov: Against Extremes: Five Decades of Painting

• Mira Schor and Jason Andrew with Phong Bui

• Official site of the Estate of Jack Tworkov

• ARTnews, May 1953: Tworkov Paints a Picture

“My hope is to confront the picture without a ready technique or prepared attitude—a condition which is nevertheless never completely attainable; to have no program and, necessarily then, no preconceived style. To paint no Tworkovs.” – Jack Tworkov, from a journal entry dated March 3, 1958

“The consciousness of the personal and spontaneous… stimulated the artist to invent devices of handling, processing, surfacing, which confer to the utmost degree the aspect of the freely made. Hence the importance of the mark, the stroke, the brush, the drip, the quality of the substance of the paint itself, and the surface of the canvas as a texture and field of operation – all signs of the artist’s active presence….. The impulse . . . becomes tangible and definite on the surface of a canvas through the painted mark. We see, as it were, the track of emotion, its obstruction, persistence or extinction…. (E)lements of so-called chance or accident [are] submitted to critical control by the artist who is alert to the rightness and wrongness of the elements delivered spontaneously, and accepts or rejects them.”

Meyer Schapiro
quoted by Irving Sandler in A Sweeper-Up After Artists: A Memoir.

“Hybrid forms are more obvious now … perhaps the symbol bank is near capacity and the only alternative is exploration of ideas reflecting off the surfaces of other ideas. Or perhaps this is what the creative process has always been about and now, for some reason, it has become visible in conscious application.” - Jon Hassell

Surreptitious photo taken on Newbury Street, Boston, 2000

“The street becomes a dwelling for the flâneur; he is as much at home among the facades of houses as a citizen is in his four walls. To him the shiny, enamelled signs of businesses are at least as good a wall ornament as an oil painting is to the bourgeois in his salon. The walls are the desk against which he presses his notebooks; news-stands are his libraries and the terraces of cafés are the balconies from which he looks down on his household after his work is done.”

- Walter Benjamin

“Reality is opaque; but there are certain points – clues, signs – which allow us to decipher it.” – Carlo Ginzburg

All forms of beauty, like all possible phenomena, contain an element of the eternal and an element of the transitory – of the absolute and of the particular. Absolute and eternal beauty does not exist, or rather it is only an abstraction skimmed from the general surface of different beauties. The particular element in each manifestation comes from the emotions: and just as we have our own particular emotions, so we have our own beauty. – Baudelaire

“Everything that the big city threw away, everything it lost, everything it despised, everything it crushed underfoot, he catalogues and collects… He sorts things out and makes a wise choice; he collects, like a miser guarding a treasure, the refuse which will assume the shape of useful or gratifying objects between the jaws of the goddess of industry.” – Baudelaire