Images (Not) Made By Chance.

LEONARDO, da Vinci, 1452-1519; GOYEN, Jan van, 1596-1656; SAENREDAM, Pieter Jansz, 1597-1665

To the artist in need of inspiration, Leonardo recommends: ‘look at walls splashed with a number of stains or stones of various mixed colours’; the artist who can, in fact, pull new ideas from such inchoate forms proves himself worthy of the name. The motif of chance images – as it appears in the work of Leonardo and many others down to the present – generally takes image-making to be a productive, positive, and additive affair. In the wake of Reformation image breaking, however, specifically in certain modes of Dutch landscape painting, where the destructive, negative, and subtractive operations integral to image-making come to the fore, this motif takes an ironic turn. In this context, the erasure and alteration of earlier images emerges as integral to the artistic process – now understood less as the birth of the new than as the (sometimes violent) engagement with what was always, already there. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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