“In his book about Francis Bacon, the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze writes about ‘the painting before painting.’
There is no such thing as an empty canvas, something is always already there—historical ways of painting, contemporary ways of painting, your own way of painting, clichés, the culture’s entire repertoire of motifs and methods.
If you are going to paint a man or a chair in front of you, you have to force your way through the whole thicket of inner images, as the painting has to emerge in its own right, and for this to happen it can’t be governed by what was there before, it has to be present in the moment. All art, I dare to affirm, is about getting to that point.
And here self-doubt and inadequacy offer an access. Not being able, not knowing—that is the starting point of creation.
Such a thing as a new beginning, a place emptied of the past, of course doesn’t really exist, but the moment exists, and if we are able to disregard ourselves we can become a part of it instead of it being a part of us.”
(excerpt from “The World-Changing Gaze of Celia Paul”, written by Karl Ove Knausgaard in the New Yorker in the January 27, 2025 issue)