Laurie Danial

Statement/Beautiful Losers 2008

 I am 6 or 7 years old, sitting at the big dining room table working on my new paint by numbers clown face painting. Painting kits like these were popular when I was little and my mother would buy them for me from time to time. This kit came with several little pots of thick, gloppy color and a cheap bulky brush with hairs that stuck out in all directions. Painstakingly, I attempted to paint all the tiny areas with the appropriate color. Near tears and frustrated with the botched results, I threw a small fit. My mother consoled me and said, “You’re just tired, tomorrow is another day.” My unhappiness was only exacerbated by the fact that I knew that my lack of success had nothing to do with being tired and that my painting would never come close to resembling the picture on the front of the box. Nothing short of perfection was acceptable. This early memory marks for me a proclivity hell bent on an esthetic ideal or as Yeats refers to in his poem “The Fascination of What’s Difficult.”

 In the last two years I have been painting continually. As a result there is this constant churning of images in my mind. I sometimes dream of these perfect visions of geometric and color configurations which I then record as source material. Sometimes the most seductive incentive for a new painting is the way the paint looks piled up on my palette or some signage on the back of a truck. These images, however nonsensical or awkward, provide a space for the painting to take place. I generally work for long periods until I have exhausted myself with issues generated by free association, subliminal narration, gesture and formal concerns. A messy showdown of abstraction, figuration and literal imagery, so much so that I often feel like Houdini held under water with only a few minutes left to get the chains off and swim to the surface. Painting this way most certainly creates a tension between what I know and what I don’t know. Mixed up with all of this is the phrase Beautiful Losers. I think it has something to do with potential, intent and results. It’s about never quite reaching that place or image but finding in its place something you can live with. It refers to the work we do and the people we know.

daqui.