Place in Painting

This essay examines the role of place in painting. This role is multiple – at once attracting our look but also locatory of whatever is displayed in the painting itself and attracting our attention to it as a place distinct from the place where we are painting it or viewing it. Examined here is also the role of the lived body in the apprehension of place in painting: a corporeal animating force that animates a genuinely lived place as it is set forth or intimated in paintings of seen, remembered, or imagined places. Such placially specific paintings are at once a commentary and a continuation on how we experience places in the context of the lived world. Included are analyses of three placially oriented paintings of my own as well as one by de Kooning – all in an effort to show the multivalence of place in painting.