Express Service Line
(click image to enlarge)
Kate Cummins

“Kill your darlings.”

The English writer Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch is known as the first to coin to the saying “Murder your darlings,” often attributed to William Faulkner, I believe from the movie about him. I’m more familiar with Stephen King’s version of the same thing from his book On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft: he wrote; “Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.”

I took this concept on directly for a series of work based on “fake news” where I’d paint with some news item in mind and then deliberately paint over much of the areas to obscure the original painting, to edit and kill the darlings in fact to kill the truth. The result are abstracted images of flowers in trussed vases. The flattened perspective is meant to suggest only a facade a, “fake beauty” where truth has been nullified. By killing my darlings the work finds its meaning.