Canvas

Reality is ephemeral; it is only our ideas of it that have any solidity to them.

I've always enjoyed unfinished paintings.

My first was a portrait of George Washington that only came down to the tops of his shoulders; if you ever see the full canvas the painting is on, you can see that there was room left to include his whole body, likely seated. I used to pass the time in class imagining what might be there; what sort of chair, or sometimes bicycle, he'd be sitting on; various outfits and poses; several ancient pencil sketches of our first president surfing were born of such musings, I admit. And yet anything like the truth of the image was long since lost to its artist's death; the blank of the canvas can host any picture an onlooker might see fit to imagine there, as indeed may the scene beyond the frame and on to the whole of post-revolutionary America. To be sure, there would be little value in pictures beyond the aesthetic if it were not for our capacity to see past them.

Such is my sense for the "realness" of reality, and of thought. The myriad images which might decorate an unmarred canvas, these I call the truths of the natural world; as there is a bounded infinity of pictures one may display with a particular paint and canvas, so there are a range of logically justifiable "truths" or interpretations of the natural world. In painting, however, and however carefully, we find ourselves backing into a corner.