I have been researching painting, the philosophy of painting. Specifically I have looked at a book on Francis Bacon by Gilles Deleuze, which I chose because of the definition that is given to a 'mirror', "Bacon's Mirror." It is beyond its reflective qualities and talks about it as a space where the "body and its shadow" enter to become disfigured, and then reconfigure to become the Figure. The term figure does not refer to the object, but rather to the idea, conceptual idea. In this book I found links to Cezanne. Cezanne had a way of painting that took objects in the foreground and blended them with objects in the backround, what he termed "repoussior," which means something that pushes back. I understand this idea in terms of the way a mirror can operate, how something away or not in immediate view can be brought in to the scene, not as an object, but as a space, and not as a complete, but as a fragment of something else. Diego Velasquez's painting, Las Meninas was a strong example of how two spaces or more can oscillate about each other, the invisible can become visible by another means.


In all of these paintings I see a strong idea, and that is 'paint the sensation.'

I have started a drawing using the first 3-week exercise as a basis to demonstrate this idea of sensations in painting. I also am incorpating the mirror, and its reflections, and transformations within it. It will be of a different nature than the built form. I am thinking of putting this into performative techniques.