Painting’s correspondence

How might a painter or a painting correspond? In this dialogue, artists Rebecca Fortnum and Kelly Chorpening explore the ambiguity of the word correspondence as a creative method in painting. They examine the word as a set of equivalences or affinities, forged through the act of painting, as well as painting as a form of address. They evoke Charles Baudelaire’s poem ‘Correspondences’ (1857) and its many translations as a starting point to explore how things and ideas co-respond. Their discussion thinks through the relation between touch and sight within the painting process and how gestures or marks represent spatial dimensions and materialities. Debating ideas of mediation and copying suggested by the notion of correspondence, they propose that the term may be useful in allowing painters to forge multiple and varied connections and explore coincidences with and through their subject. Painting is positioned as a form of co-response that happens across time, allowing the painter to form correlations between past and present.