Monday Motivator: Elements You Can’t Give a Name

“Start a picture using only elements to which you cannot give a name … pictures are usually begun by drawing the most identifiable, most obvious things in the field of vision: a sailboat, a church spire, the horizon, a road, a tree”

Wolf Kahn, in “Wolf Khan’s America, An Arrist’s Travels”, page 46

What can’t you name in a landscape led me to wondering what I name and what I describe. Which led me to thinking about how things that could be named would be nouns and things that can’t be named might be adjectives. Which led me to wondering about where the verbs would be in a landscape, and creating a painting using mark making that reflected the verbs. Or painting a series: the nouns, the adjectives, and the verbs. Or painting each as separate layers in a painting. Or stop overthinking it as if I were back in Semantics 101!

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