A few years ago, during a moment of extraordinary political uncertainty and collective mourning, I had a conversation with an artist known largely for digital and multimedia work. They told me that they were returning to painting. When I asked why, the artist said, “I’m going home.”
For many artists, painting is a practice intimately intertwined with their earliest experiences of art—one as old as art itself. It’s a physical process, an attempt to make meaning through the hand—through labor, through matter itself—that engages the body through imagination and imagination through the body. Anyone who has ever stood before a painting and felt it rearrange something inside them can attest to this.