Videos

How Much Paint Does the Painting Need?

1992, 30 min.

How Much Paint Does The Painting Need presents multiple perspectives on the process of making art from the point of view of actors as well as critics and the artists themselves. A fusion of the present, past, mythology, religious imagery and innovative art forms.

An experimental art film of seething, coming-to-the-surface violence and raging, polyphonous voices. The collaged surface of images and rich, color-saturated shots of artists speaking and repeating Owens' poetry from behind veils or screens of rain-splattered glass or meshes of ropes suggest new ways of reading Owens' poetry. One motif predominates: a strong, white-robed Native American woman striding through tall green marsh grass. This image connects the visceral with the earth, and suggests that colonized or exterminated peoples (or genders) still live in the core of the cultural imagination.