APOPHATIC

2023, Oil on Canvas

It’s finals week, senior year, I’m in Advanced Painting class. Everything I’ve made this semester is cut from the same cloth. I wanted to do something completely different, try to let go of my “style” that I’d been boxing myself into. Our prompt for our final painting was “Apophatic” I had never really heard this word until I started reading the syllabus for this class. This is an excerpt from my painting journal for the weeks leading up to this piece being due…

“ Trying to understand this prompt has been my main thing this week. I haven’t painted as much as I’ve thought about painting. This prompt feels very Ecclesiastical. Which makes sense because I feel like I’m looking at everything through that lens. But to be apophatic means something cannot be defined by what it isn’t. Beauty is not the absence of ugliness. Pain is not the absence of pleasure. Love is not the absence of hate. So we’re really dealing with the in-between, the grey area. The part of the spectrum between the two extremes. The in-betweens come in the everyday. The best moments in life are not the absence of the worst moments.”