paintings

Weddings offer the most rehearsed images of intimacy in our stream. Everyone knows the shots before they're taken — the dress, the hands, the kiss on cue. I pull from that archive the way I pull from any other. Somebody promises somebody something. Nuptials: from nubere, to veil. The word for marriage is a word for covering — the promise gets made to a face partly seen. When philosophers needed an example of words that don't describe but do, they took it from the altar: say "I do" in the right room, in front of witnesses, and the sentence marries you. A vow is speech that acts. A mark is the same kind of sentence. It doesn't describe anything; it commits. Ink goes down and can't be taken back — only covered, half-erased, promised again. The paintings work the vow over the way a marriage does: laid in, redrawn, each pass a revision of the last. The surface holds all the attempts at once. The titles say: till death do us part, death and the maiden, married, tonight's the night. Borrowed words — vow, song, movie line. Something new, something old, something borrowed. What everyone already says at these moments, found the way the images are found, and said again.