La Vista Totale: Apologia
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I am interested in style, especially its psychological significance. I regard style, in the practice of painting as enacted by a professional painter - by that, meaning a painter who works out of continuous daily practice - as something which emerges unconsciously out of the altered state of consciousness - or trance - to which the artist submits in the course of the practice.
While planning, ideas, and theory may set the stage for an artwork, or attend its postmortem, the process from which style emerges is a special state in which attention is focused, narrowed, filtered and distorted in a way that resembles, in turns, autism, paranoia, meditative states and "split personality." The afterglow of the experience can even resemble mania (after a period of time) or mystical experience.