"Tall Painting" Appeal is Hypnotic Precision and Unpredictability

You're getting sleepy...very, very sleepy. I wish. At 2:54 I cannot sleep.

Just a couple of months ago I was boasting to a friend about how I slept like the dead, now here I am these days (nights) up in the dark, reading, surfing the Internet, or sketching. Serves me right, but at least I was correct to appreciate a good night's sleep while it was mine.

How I found this mesmerizing video: Reading The Comeback by Emma Gilbey Keller, about women who set down their careers for a while to raise children, then pick up again later. (A la "You really CAN have it all; just not all at once.") One of the women interviewed for the book was Maxine Snider, a furniture designer, whose life (at least as described in the book) seems quite perfect. From the descriptions of her childhood, her home office in the late 70's, her successful daughters, art-savvy lawyer/photographer husband and their travels together; who wouldn't want to peek at her furniture line and website to see the public material results? For sale to the trade.

That's what I love about design, all of it: furniture, architecture, graphic design. I even delight in those fat reference books on color, filled with endless chiplets of it, arranged in tables of cascading shades and hues; and all sorts of delicious combinations. Everything about the design world -- and the people who inhabit it -- seems just, well, too perfect. Coincidentally I'm also reading a book about small dwellings in which the author refers to shelter magazines as "housewife porn," which shames me into admitting my guilt in that regard.

But art is a little different, isn't it? It's messy, for one thing. Enter the Maxine Snider blog for the insomniac's delectation.

Holton Rower's Tall Painting video is a little bit of both art and design. Organized, unpredictably precise messiness.

We all know that when you pour paint over a box it will flow down; that old gravity thing. We know, after some experimentation, when the paint is "set" enough to hold another color without mixing and becoming muddy. So we know in a sense what to expect.

And yet to watch the painting being made -- the succession of color and the lines the paint forms as it flows -- is a surprise possibly more pleasing than the finished result.

Somehow I guess that's the point. I knew if I wrote it down I would find the end of this thread so I could sleep again...

It's the process. 

Perhaps Ms. Snider would not have become a furniture designer if she hadn't stopped working to raise her kids. Perhaps she might not have begun painting and drawing in that lull women feel when the kids grow up and begin to not need Mom quite so much. Perhaps she'd have stayed in her first career (commercial interior design) forever if not for those years at home.

Although I'd have preferred eight straight hours of z's, I probably would have missed this video, and possibly a tiny moment in my evolution. (Don't think for a moment it doesn't embarrass me to say "my evolution," but it is almost 4:00 am.) Maybe this indulgence was a fair trade for sleep.