piercing the sublime

Philip Taaffe, Red Caliph, (2002).

"I was going to see movies in the afternoon and then I'd come home and I'd try to work at night. I had a small room, and on one wall I mounted drawing paper, and using paint sticks and a little cassette tape recorder I'd start to work myself into a frenzy, describing a part of the film that I had seen. When I started to induce this activity I was making lines on the paper, and as the lines suggested certain pictorial memories, I began to speak into the microphone. Then I'd throw another piece of paper over the paint-stick and start another one. I did this for a couple of months—not every night, because it was a very intense activity. After a while I noticed that as I was murmuring into the microphone and making these lines and describing what I was trying to get at in the painting, the words would fall away and the gestures and images would take over..."

Philip Taaffe (2002)