A Quote by Mary Heilmann

One thing that really interests me is-and it comes out of Chinese and Japanese painting-where you have a number of different kinds of space in the same painting. You have a kind of deep space, and then you have something like right up on the surface.
I'm never interested in the painting being a mirror to culture. I think that's really boring. What I'm interested in is painting as an affective space. The place where the hierarchies of the world can be rearranged within the space of a painting. And they can be articulated in different ways.
My experience with life is that it's very fragmented. In one place certain kinds of thing occur, and in another place a different kind of thing occurs. I would like my work to have some vivid indication of those differences. I guess, in painting, it would amount to different kinds of space being represented in it.
You begin by engaging the left hemisphere of the brain with the overall shape, the basic structure of the painting, and then eventually you engage with the colour, with the mood of the painting and then you are entering the activities of the right hemisphere - and it is in the right hemisphere that ideas of space are born, the realization that you are seeing space.
When I'm painting the picture, I'm really painting a picture. I may have a flat-footed technique, or something like that, but still, to me, the thrill, or the meat of the thing, is the actual painting. I don't get any thrill out of laying it out.
I think I've always been afraid of painting, really. Right from the beginning. All my paintings are about painting without a painter. Like a kind of mechanical form of painting.
There are different kinds of painting, some with lights and some without, but still if you look at any painting here (in the light) and then over here (out of the light) it's an entirely different thing. The consciousness of this came to the Impressionists and I'm very interested in that.
I think every painting should be the same size and the same color so they're all interchangeable and nobody thinks they have a better painting or a worse painting.... Besides even when the subject is different, people want the same painting.
The idea of, say, the compressed space between the floor and the object hanging over it and then the long space between the object and the ceiling was a kind of interesting idea for me - the idea of compressing and expanding. That was an idea that I worked with, which you could only do sculpturally. You can't really do with a painting on the wall.
In my earlier paintings, I wanted the space between the picture plane and the spectator to be active. It was in that space, paradoxically, the painting 'took place.' Then, little by little, and to some extent deliberately, I made it go the other way, opening up an interior space... so that there was a layered, shallow depth.
I think I've always been afraid of painting, really. Right from the beginning. All my paintings are about painting without a painter. Like a kind of mechanical form of painting. Like finding some imaginary computer painter, or a robot who paints.
Painting is the most magical of mediums. The transcendence is truly amazing to me every time I go to a museum and I see how somebody figured another way to rub colored dirt on a flat surface and make space where there is no space or make you think of a life experience.
I like to be the right thing in the wrong space and the wrong thing in the right space. But usually being the right thing in the wrong space and the wrong thing in the right space is worth it, because something funny always happens.
But, after all, the aim of art is to create space - space that is not compromised by decoration or illustration, space within which the subjects of painting can live.
There aren't really rules for painting, but there’s certain facts and fictions about painting. Part of what I do is document another surface and sort of translate it. They’re like translations, and then part of it is fiction, which is invention.
For me space rock is something that takes you out of yourself and out of your normal realm. And if space happens to be that inner space or outer space it's a very personal thing. I think that mantra is space music. I think that Native American tribal drumming is space music. Anything that allows you to go inward to go outward and to move within a space that is not normal to your reality.
Believe me... I've made a career out of being the right thing in the wrong space and the wrong thing in the right space. That's one thing... I really do know about.
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