The utility of words often outshines more subtle lines of communication like a streetlight obscuring the moons’ profound calm with its direct, brash illumination.
Music, dance and the visual arts glow behind the streetlight.
Henri Bergson theorized a hundred years ago that conscious beings experience time as accreting. It accumulates, and as it builds, our growing memory of lived experience changes the way we see and interact with the world. A jazz number builds as well, expanding, changing key or color while maintaining a connection with the underlying melody, like a meandering river whose destination may not be apparent but whose channel shifts as the current plays off the sand, soil, and rocks.
Such is the experience of painting, both creating and viewing a painting.
The painting itself is a physical and visual manifestation of the accretion of time or of thinking as it develops, responds and leaves tracks in the paint, tracks that accumulate and are altered by the tracks after them. In essence, painting is an exploration, a journey. And a painting that elicits contemplation can take the viewer on a journey like a paper boat on the meandering river, a river without words but full of ideas, allusions, and adventure.