I am 65 years old, or as the french would say, I have 65 years. I have been a professional painter (artist type) for 40 of those years, and during all that time I have been passionate about painting - I mean totally obsessed with the subject of painting, and totally involved with the doing of painting. To this day, my whole life revolves around the paintings that I am doing, or have done, or might do in the future.
The world could come to an end tomorrow and it wouldn't bother me a bit, as long as I could keep on painting. To paint is my role in life, and the meaning of my life. Painting is my reality, it is what I care deeply about. I understand the world, to the degree that I do understand it, through painting. Politics to me is a subset of painting. Philosophy is a subset of painting. God is a subset of painting.
Painting is in fact much older than politics, or philosophy, older even than religion. There's a good argument to be made that painting has recorded the history of the human spirit with greater precision than any other recording technology.
But painting is, and always has been a language in code. Encoded within a painting of say, Pierre Bonnard, is far more human information than what is contained in a photograph of the same period and subject. Paintings are not, and never have been literal. Paintings are mystical, rather than literal transcriptions of reality.
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