The content is what gets me going. But the figurative element is also for structure, and once I start painting, the painting takes over. On the other hand, artists of Wiesenfeld's sociocultural vintage have a distrust of pure formalism, doubting if that was possible even during the predominance of abstraction in America over the past 50 years. If I don't feel strongly about my content, I usually don't get a good painting out of it. Again, the painter affirms a return to the figuratively rendered subjective over the abstractly rendered, so-called objective.
Human beings are so much more complicated than their shapes.
But I tend to look at things as a metaphor for painting - the way our minds put thoughts together. It is only with the rise of European modernism in the 20th century that artists began to assume that the complexities of a corporeal being could best be represented by a decorporealized art, a brand of world-scale cultural gnosticism that contemporary representationalists like Alexandra Wiesenfeld doesn't even bother to deplore. Instead she professes a profound, liberating aesthetic solipsism. Every painting you do, no matter what, is a self-portrait. I have a few subjects that I keep coming back to.