On the Edge

August 24, 2025

In painting, there are the conventions, the rules, the forms, the compositions that have been passed down and polished over centuries, and then there is everything else. Everything wild, raw, disobedient, uninvited. That’s where real painting lives. Not tucked safely within the borders of what’s been deemed proper or academic, but right on the edge, where the brush shakes, where tradition ends, where questions start to whisper and rules begin to break.

To get to that place, to even approach that edge with any sense of purpose, the artist must first bow to the past. Not in submission, but in understanding. You study the masters not to mimic them, but to know what you're up against. You go deep into the history of painting, the sacred geometry of the Renaissance, the emotional thunder of Romanticism, the fragmentation of Cubism, the austerity of Minimalism, not to inherit those styles, but to feel the weight of them so that you can choose what to carry forward and what to burn.

Because painting, when it’s alive, is not a matter of pleasing. It is a matter of pressing against the membrane of what’s been done and finding out where it breaks. The canvas becomes a field of possibility. Sometimes it’s a battlefield. Sometimes it’s a confessional. But it is never neutral. The edge is not a place you arrive at with a map. You find it by pushing, by misstepping, by doing what doesn’t make sense until suddenly it does. And in that unstable place, where beauty isn’t always pretty, where forms collapse into gesture, where meaning is made out of feeling more than depiction, that’s where painting breathes.

You can only paint on the edge if you’ve stood in the center long enough to know what you’re leaving behind. That’s the paradox. You need structure to destroy it. You need lineage to rebel. And the more you know, the freer you are to move beyond. The history of art is not a cage, it’s a set of keys. Use them not to lock yourself into tradition, but to unlock something new. Something personal. Something unapproved.

Because to truly paint is to risk. To say something without asking if you’re allowed. To chase a mark that hasn’t been sanctioned. To make something that might not fit anywhere but still demands to exist. That is the edge. That is the calling. And that is where the real work begins.