Field guide No. 288
The painted fish leaves the frame
Thick paint, thicker ambition.
A silver fish made of heavy impasto strokes climbs out of its gilt-framed seascape onto the ledge, paint dripping down the wall beneath it. The sea stays put.
Field notePaint in a picture and fish out of it, at the same moment. The seascape stays strictly two-dimensional.
- Specimen
- No. 288
- Genus
- Generated
- Kind
- Impossible (the round square kind)
- Breaks
- Category
- Where it doesn’t exist
- A gallery wall, just below a gilt frame.
- Nearest existing relative
- An oil painting of a fish.
- Filed in Fresh slop as
- Surreal
Also impossible, also breaking category
The horizon comes looseThe horizon is where the ground appears to end. A thing that only appears cannot peel.
Two dimensions shortLive zebra at the front, flat cardboard at the back. One animal cannot be both, however tight the budget.
The chair's impossible treeA shadow is a chair’s outline or it isn’t a chair’s shadow. This one is a tree’s, cast by a chair.
The onion’s impossible reflectionSteel reflects what’s set on it. Here the onion is one shape and its reflection another, both at once.