Andrew Doran

Andrew Doran in Snippets | 20 April 2025

📚 Finished reading Intimacies by Katie Kitamura. A small slice of the life, relationships and feelings of an American working at the International Criminal Court in The Hague. It’s a novel that feels like a novella — we drop into and out of the story in a very short space of time. I enjoyed this.

“ For that reason, the paintings opened up a dimension that you did not normally see in photographs, in these paintings you could feel the weight of time passing. I thought that was why, as I stood before a painting of a young girl in half-light, there was something that was both guarded and vulnerable in her gaze. It was not the contradiction of a single instant, but rather it was as if the painter had caught her in two separate states of emotion, two different moods, and managed to contain them within the single image. There would have been a multitude of such instants captured in the canvas, between the time she first sat down before the painter and the time she rose, neck and upper body stiff, from the final sitting. That layering-in effect a kind of temporal blurring, or simultaneity was perhaps ultimately what distinguished painting from photography. I wondered if that was the reason why contemporary painting seemed to me so much flatter, to lack the mysterious depth of these works, because so many painters now worked from photographs.” — Intimacies by Katie Kitamura

Andrew Doran

Published

20 April 2025

Andrew Doran in Snippets | 20 April 2025

Related

Published

20 April 2025

Leave a commentCancel reply