I Might Make Out With You

Blobs, clouds, splotches, blots; dreams, visions. This old equation governs, magically, the relationship between things blurred and hopes embodied: we see the unformed and find the unimagined. As Wendy Mark’s monotypes remind us, there is nothing that holds our attention, compels our fascination, so much as the artist who (literally) blurs the lines. We look at blots, and see beauty, look at things vaguely formed and see in them the shape of dreams and visions. Leonardo was perhaps the first to give this idea strict form: in his treatise on painting, when he urges the painter to look at the unformed forms of moss on cave walls, of clouds in the sky, and find in them the potential for new landscapes and compositions, never dreamt of before.

Find in them or project into them? Ah, there’s the rub—or the rubato, the stretching out of the idea. For is it our imaginations that search and send out the idea of beauty into things not quite fully there, or is it that we recognize in the not-quite-fully-there the true shape and outline of our minds, which are themselves never quite fully formed, never entirely in contour, never coloring-book clear? Do we love the fuzzy edge because it holds out hope for a vague transcendence, or because it recalls to us our muddled reality? Either way, we go on looking, and though we hope, perhaps, officially, for a Sherlock Holmes like moment of clarity, the one right clue amid the fog, the truth is that we love the cloud we see more than we like the clarity it promises.