If A Canvas Could Speak
There is the cliché (and I love clichés because by their very nature they work) that we call: the artist and his (her, to be modern) model.
What if we could find some sort of technology that when pointed at a painting like da Vinci’s La Gioconda, or at Van Gogh’s self-portrait could tell us the circumstances from the point of view of the subject of the painting? Not a chance! That would be speculative/fantasy science fiction and no more.
But there is a variant that is possible but most rare. Consider the following: What if I told you that some canvases can speak of their experience of being painted?
Argentine painter Juan Manuel Sánchez and his former wife Nora Patrich did not body paint as such. They used canvasses, paper and sculpture as their principal artistic medium. But in a few occasions (and luckily I was present to record it all) the two painted their visions on an undraped human being. No, not body painting. They transformed the real flesh and blood into a canvas of their imagination that could walk and speak. They imposed (gently) this vision on a naked body and the results were spectacular.
I am hoping that I might convince some of these living paintings to tell us of their own account on how it felt to be transformed into someone else’s vision — a superimposition willingly executed.
Originally published at blog.alexwaterhousehayward.com.
