"genus irritable": Palette knife

Friday, August 3, 2012

Palette knife

"Fuchsias" palette knife oil painting demo, 6 by 6 inches on hardboard, by Talya Johnsom, SOLD

Part of of my journey as an artist has been to find my genuine "voice."

I received some advice a few years back to abandon my palette knife in order to hone in my brushwork. My advisor felt that I would never return to knife work. But he was wrong. While my brushwork has improved, I feel my "voice" comes through much better using a palette knife. Each artist must find the tools that best express their passion. Arlon Rosenoff, thank you for helping me see there in no shame in using a palette knife, just like others have shown me there is no shame in using bright colors. In fact, I'm learning that there is no shame in just being me.

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". . . That poets (using the word comprehensively, as including artists in general) are a genus irritable, is well understood. . . An artist is an artist only by dint of his exquisite sense of Beauty — a sense affording him rapturous enjoyment, but at the same time implying or involving, an equally exquisite sense of Deformity, of disproportion. Thus a wrong — an injustice — done a poet who is really a poet, excites him to a degree which, to ordinary apprehension, appears disproportionate with the wrong. Poets see injustice never where it does not exist — but very often where the unpoetical see no injustice whatever. Thus the poetical irritability has no reference to ‘temper’ in the vulgar sense, but merely to a more than usual clear-sightedness in respect to wrong: — this clear-sightedness being nothing more than a corollary from the vivid perceptions of right — of justice — of proportion. . . But one thing is clear — that the man who is not ‘irritable’ (to the ordinary apprehension), is no poet.” ~Edgar Allan Poe