Art diary #21 - On Courage

In my practice, courage manifests as a deliberate proximity to collapse—a sustained gaze into the void just before the fall. It emerges at a precise juncture in the work: when the painting is resolved enough to be called good, but not yet alive. That’s when I risk everything. I disrupt the surface with impulsive, often aggressive gestures. This is not decorative mark-making—it is confrontation. Frequently, these interventions lead to a temporary destruction, a visual chaos that feels like failure.

And yet, this is necessary.

On Courage (120x140cm) Acrylics, oil sticks and pastels on raw cotton canvas

At that threshold, a second form of courage arises: restraint. The courage to pause. To look. I have come to believe that looking—truly looking—is a form of painting. The act of observation becomes an extension of the gesture itself.

This process is rarely graceful. More often, it feels like meeting courage with resistance—a clenched fist. It’s an uneasy, sometimes antagonistic negotiation between instinct and intention.

I’ve noticed the same dynamic in life. The courageous path is not always luminous or clean. It’s dissonant. It breaks form and it is unconfortable. And still, it leads us—both in painting and in life—somewhere utterly unanticipated. Somewhere we could not have reached without risking the rupture.

There is a persistent charge in the unresolved. Not as a stage en route to completion, but as a condition in itself. To leave a work open—to resist resolution—is not a deferral but a position. What remains, then, is not a conclusion but a proposition: can the work sustain itself as a question, rather than perform as an answer?

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