About Artworks – by Sarea Wang
Today I spent some time varnishing some paintings. It was the first time that I had varnished oil paintings. I have hesitated about varnishing because of the toxication. I wore a mask to varnish for the first pass and I felt it might not be too smelly, so I went back to do some corrections without the mask.
After finishing varnishing, I felt depressed in my mood. I thought about the feeling of being close to death. I am thinking what I was thinking when I was varnishing. I felt I didn’t think anything but was kind of occupied with taking videos. However, now I recall the tiny wonders that passed through my head very quickly while I was varnishing my paintings. I wondered whether others would want to have these pieces, and who would take them. It was like wondering who will spend time with your kids after you leave them. (No kids right now, only cats at home.) I created the pieces with all my energy and aesthetic thoughts to reach the point of putting down my brush at a certain point. Each piece recorded my emotion and energy during the time I visually perceived the subject in front of me. That invisible and spontaneous feeling I have had can’t be duplicated at another time, so I usually don’t go back to revise them after the setting has been removed. And I like writing down the date and year in the painting. I know there might be rules that painters only put down years and initials of names or just initials. However, I like to put down the numbers of the dates I have put the most energy and effort into this painting. It was like, till that day and during some days before that day, my mind was burning on this subject and my spirit overflowed to my painting. It was like a relationship that I loved the most. After that peak point, my feeling will go down. And the view in my eyes or mind will be different than what I saw before. That invisible feeling might vary when I face different subjects or on different days.
My paintings are visual language to record the time that I spent with the still life setting in my eyes and mind. Sometimes, I do feel nostalgic and feel that my heart still stayed at a certain point in the past. However, I rationally realized that the time passed couldn’t be repeated. So, I just want to move on when I feel I have put enough energy and effort into one painting. That’s the same as our life. There is a time for everything. I put all my spirits on the canvas to visually record the subject in my eyes and mind till the moment that I felt exhausted, and at that time, the subjects also changed to be different from the image I saw when I started that painting. And that’s the moment I decided to stop painting. I can’t time-travel to the past, at least I don’t know how to time-travel right now. And if it was possible to go back to the past, what change would I make? Does that matter what decision I made in the past? What if I made another decision? Then I guess it will be like painting a painting in completely different styles. Then, there would be completely different paintings.
However, one canvas can only be presented one way or the other. So, every painting is like those memories that were only once in a lifetime. I don’t want to regret the style I chose with each painting. That was the creation of both God and me. As a human being, I made every decision with limited perception and comprehension. I know that none of my paintings is perfect, but that is the reality and unavoidable fact of human beings’ capacity. I chose to accept the reality created by both me and God. And for the reason of cherishing the effort, energy, and time that I spent on my paintings, I marked them with the price I feel worth. I don’t want to sell them for cheaper prices to increase my sales or to attract customers. Maybe I overvalued myself and my time, but everyone has a right to make their own decision and stick to that. I truly hope there will be people who appreciate my paintings which recorded my unique experiences with the still life settings or just intuition I received mysteriously. Artworks are alternative assets whose value are very debatable. I hope my paintings can record the spirit that I shared with the subject during my creation, rather than only use my painting skills to mechanically fill in the canvas. I believe any creation is the result of both occasionality and certainty.