Barbara Friedman If all painting begins with looking, my recent paintings can be described as having their birth in a particular kind of looking, the overlook. The overlook from a high place combines a superior viewpoint with a distance that makes it hard to see anything; that is the subject of these pieces. I chose “overlook” to describe my newest series of paintings because it is a word that can mean the opposite of itself. Just as what is left is what remains but what has left has gone away, “overlook” can describe a high complete vantage point but can also point to a neglectful way of seeing. Freud was fascinated by such words and devoted an essay to them, “The Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words”; Edward Said, writing about this essay, said, “Freud believed that words in fact continue to imply their opposite, the known carrying with it a considerable freight of the unknown.” In these paintings, scrutiny goes together with incompleteness of vision. Essentially I’m thinking about the act of overlooking in all its meanings by depicting scenes from a high, all-inclusive vantage point that at the same time suggests partial vision and fleeting glances.
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