Stubborn Repetition

james harden beard

“Homage to Wassily Kandinsky, author of first purely abstract painting.” Credit Filip Peraić.

In my own modest easel practice I’m trying to psych myself into painting a subject more than once. Artists I admire do it. Real artists. They dwell and go deep; obsess, in a good way. I’m afraid I have a tendency just to skate over surfaces, then move on. I got a kick out of this article about Filip Peraić, who goes deep on one athlete’s profile.

Filip Peraić needed a career boost. He found one by drawing Harden, the Houston Rockets guard, in profile over and over and over again.

“I like repetition, and I’m a bit stubborn,” he said when asked how he could keep coming back to the same image. “When I made a couple of them I thought, ‘This is really interesting.’ It’s a challenge for me.”

james harden beard again

Filip Peraić.

(Benjamin Hoffman, “What Better Muse Than James Harden’s Beard?” NYTimes, 3-27-19)

(c) 2019 JMN.

About JMN

I live in Texas and devote much of my time to easel painting on an amateur basis. I stream a lot of music, mostly jazz, throughout the day. I like to read and memorize poetry.
This entry was posted in Quotations and tagged . Bookmark the permalink.

3 Responses to Stubborn Repetition

  1. Hello. Did you get my email a couple of days ago?

    Liked by 1 person

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.