Artists' Artists: Sean Landers

In 1992, I thought I knew all I needed to know about René Magritte. So, when I saw his retrospective at The Metropolitan Museum of Art that year, I was expecting the expected. That is when I came face to face for the first time with Magritte’s ‘La Période Vache’ (The Cow Period), and my personal favourite painting, Le Stropiat. It made me call into question everything I was doing, while confirming it at the same time. Back then, I was making large, unstretched, stream-of-consciousness text paintings to illustrate my belief that the contents of a mind while in the act of painting were, in fact, the actual content of that painting. When I saw the ‘Vache’ paintings, I saw that very thing being done with images – automatic images akin to automatic writing. I liked the way Magritte thought in his paint. His sense of humour and inventiveness in his ‘Vache’ period were like a cool, fresh breeze within his retrospective. At once, I knew that I had to find my own ‘Vache’ period.