[hemmert]

Thank you!

Actually, the longest part of building this was finding the right wording. Here are some previous attempts:

- When painting this, I had no artistic intent

- When painting this, there was nothing I wanted to express with the picture

- When painting this, I wanted to express nothing

In German, there's a nice ambiguity: "Bei diesem Bild habe ich mir nichts gedacht" is somewhere between 'I was not thinking' and 'I wanted to express nothing.'. It's also the reason why I went with a German stamp (which is my mother tongue) and not an English one.

It is SO complicated to say that I wasn't up to anything with these pictures.

[annowiki]

There's a piece of graffiti from the May 1968 Paris riots that goes "I have something to say but I don't know what." Reminds me of this. I can't find the original French but I think it's something like "J'ai quelque chose a dire mais je ne sais quoi."

Found it: https://www.dicocitations.com/citations/citation-67489.php

They use the pas

[BrandoElFollito]

This is a great historical slogan, thanks for bringing it up.

There is a big difference between "... je ne sais quoi" and "... je ne sais pas quoi".

"... je ne sais pas quoi" means "I don't know what". The slogan is indeed "I have something to say but I don't know what".

"je ne sais quoi" is a weird French construction which is actually a name. It takes a masculin determinant and means "a little something".

Il manque à ce plat un petit je ne sais quoi = this meal is missing a little something

[hemmert]

Ah, nice! I'll compile a page of related projects on the website (with all the interesting links from this discussion), and that will go on it, too, of course! Thanks!

[runlaszlorun]

Very Zen. Not being sarcastic and don’t mean in the corny way it’s often used here in the States implying peaceful gardens of tranquility… blah… blah… blah.

But, if I may be so bold, what you describe there is the essence of Zen. And also why zenmasters are famously reluctant to find words for it. :)

[hemmert]

Ah, I wasn't aware of that parallel – thank you!

[tobr]

It sounds like you are very concerned with making sure people know this. Were you concerned with that before you painted them? Before you decided to share them, and how to share them? Then clearly there is an artistic intent behind them.

[hemmert]

That's an interesting point that got me thinking already:

No, I wasn't aware of that when painting most of the pictures. I just enjoyed the process of painting. But, as you can imagine, wall space gets limited after painting number 25, and at some point they were hanging in the staircase, all the way down to our basement. So I thought about selling them.

That was the point when I thought that I'd love to mark them as painted without any intent. That was before picture 25, I'd say.

Now, number 26 was painted KNOWING that I'd be marking it as painted without anything in mind, which somehow (same for all upcoming pictures) increases the 'pressure' of not adding any meaning.

Until now, I'm comfortable with that (the painting process is so much fun), and it's probably a thing worth exploring further. Perhaps I could write something contradictory on the front?

[throwuwu]

Tell me about your mother…

[chki]

Thanks for the added explanation! German is my mother tongue as well and I also think "Bei diesem Bild habe ich mir nichts gedacht" is very elegant and basically not translatable.

[runlaszlorun]

I’ve grown to greatly appreciate those phrases that don’t translate. Admittedly, as someone who got competent in formal programming languages before I was ever competent in a second human one- it took me a while to appreciate the “syntax error”… lol.

Aber für Deutsch, brauche iche mehr ubung! :)

[jareklupinski]

"I allowed myself to be guided by the spirit of art"?

as opposed to commercialism/marketing/etc

[shanebellone]

I love this. I generally dislike art; there are a few notable exceptions.

[hemmert]

Then especially, thank you! (If you haven't, check out the links to related artworks in this discussion – many of them I hadn't come across yet, but they have a similar vibe!)

[junon]

I like this a lot. Great work :)

[hemmert]

Thanks! It's great to read all your comments here. I appreciate a good mixture of aesthetics and self-referential logic conundrums. ;-)