Sometimes I think I make paintings to find something in my past and sometimes I think I paint to keep moving into the future. The writer Aleksander Hemon said “what cannot be known needs to be imagined.” Making up what is unknown is what makes being an artist such darn hard work.
T.S Eliot not only broke apart the idea of a poem during his lifetime but believed artists change the past by what they make or do in the present. He believed “what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new ( the really new) work of art among them.” I’m drawn to that interpretation where poetry (art) is applied directly to how we think about history/herstory, which we can never completely know anyway. Art makes the story.


Richard Kooyman 2011