Catch and Release

Theo Chronis

There is always a distance between the painting in the head and the painting on the surface. Every artist knows it, though few like to admit it. You imagine something (a figure, a mood, a charged arrangement of forms) and then you spend hours, months, a whole career failing to get it across. Technique narrows the gap; it never closes it. The best painters alive, the ones who leave everyone else slack-jawed, are often the most convinced they have failed, because they are the only ones who ever saw the original. Painting, before it is anything else, is the management of that failure.

When I was younger I tried to beat it the way I had been taught: by planning. Conceive the composition, make the studies, settle every inch in advance, execute. It produced competent pictures and a low, persistent dissatisfaction. The plan was never enough, because the plan belonged to another medium: it lived in language and intention, while the painting lived in pigment and accident. And the gap was only the first problem. There was chance, which I had been trained to suppress and which kept supplying the best passages anyway. There was judgement, and behind it the question of whether cademic technique still means anything now. There was narrative: whether a story belongs in a picture at all, or whether it quietly turns painting into illustration. There was the old embarrassment that the study is so often more alive than the finished work it was made to serve. I could go on; the list nearly stopped me painting altogether.

So I did the only thing left. I took ten steps back and asked whether one can paint at all while taking these problems seriously and I decided to start from the opposite end. Not from intention, but from its refusal. What if I set out to depict nothing, express nothing, mean nothing? What if I simply moved the materials around and accepted whatever fell, judging none of it? What if I painted with my eyes closed, or with the wrong hand, or let a stranger passing by put down the first marks? For someone with a classical training these are frightening things to do. They felt like vandalism. That was the point.

The reversal comes the next day. I look at the mess I have made and I read it. Not as a failure to be corrected, but as a field to be deciphered. Somewhere in it an image is trying to surface, and my task is to find it and bring it forward. But never all the way. I carry it just far enough to be recognised and no further, then I let go again: more accident, more material, another layer... and then I take it back. This is what I have come to call catch and release. The picture is built out of that rhythm: surrender, recovery, surrender. At some point, if I have judged the exchange well, the thing appears to make itself. I have stopped chasing the half-formed idea I began with. I am answering what is actually in front of me.

That answering changes the kind of attention I am paying. It is pre-verbal. It feels less like solving a problem than like improvising music, or the loose associative drift of meditation: a state in which the naming, labelling part of the mind falls quiet and something older takes the reigns. There is a specific freedom in it: the freedom of being entirely present, of acting and reacting without a script. It took me years to reach and longer to trust, because everything in my training said hold on, and the whole method depends on knowing when to let go.

I want to be precise about one thing, because it is the part most easily misread. This is not automatism, and it is not therapy. The early Surrealists attempted something adjacent and, to my mind, failed, not because the impulse was wrong, but because they drove it with language. They turned the unconscious into a vocabulary, and the work set into a Freudian, and then Jungian symbolism we have long since outgrown. I am not decoding dreams, and I am not putting my psyche on display. The chance and the projection are only raw material. What turns them into a picture, a picture for someone else, rather than a private exorcism, is structure. Composition is the one element I control completely and without apology: the architecture that holds the accident, the figuration and the mimetic suggestion together into a single thing that did not exist before. Release without catch is only noise. The discipline is in the binding.

I learned most of what I know about that binding not from European painting but from the Chinese ink masters of the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries (or rather from years of trying, and largely failing, to copy them). What that tradition understands is how much can be carried by an empty space; how a few decisive marks can summon an entire world precisely because so much has been withheld. Control and relinquishing it are not opposites there. They are the same skill. That is the lesson I keep trying to smuggle back into a layered, mixed, and more recently a half-digital practice that, on its surface, looks nothing like it.

None of this makes the work easier. If anything it makes it harder, and certainly stranger. But it is the only way I have found to close some of the distance I started with: not by forcing the painting to match the picture in my head, but by catching the intention at the moment it forms, before language and planning have had time to flatten it. What comes out is unfinished on purpose, or rather, completion comes from a meta-game of harmony of contrasts, suspended between accident and order, and asking the viewer to chip in to the completeness of the work. That, in the end, is what the letting go is for. I keep my hands a little open, so that someone else can put theirs in.