(The encounter) The event: painting as a site for transformation

For as long as I can remember, I have been enthralled by paintings. I recall going to the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow with my father when I was seven years old. Amongst the recognisable paintings of idyllic forest scenes by Ivan Shishkin and the less than idyllic scenes of peasant life by Ilya Repin, I first encountered Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square (1915). We turned a corner and there it was, hanging on the other side of a long room. The painting stopped me, and for a moment time stood still. I looked at it with all my naivety, and it looked back at me with all its force. Whilst my father mocked the simplicity of the work (in hindsight, probably to provoke me), I was slowly realising that painting could be anything, and that my runny gouaches of chickens were somehow part of this. Twenty five years later I am still enthralled by, and often bothered, frustrated, and curious about paintings and what happens between us and the picture. This essay is a record of sorts of the many different threads of theory and research into this space as I now see it, and forms part of an ever-growing web of thinking and making.