The Crow and Bacchus fucked
Beneath the cretan crown
Ariadne’s tears created a river
Bacchus’ Merlot ejaculation created another.
The music beganThe rivers merged and flooded
Before joining with the river lethe
Pathway to hell and drink of amnesia,
and then melting into a stream flowing with wine.
The stage was set

Four figures danced around an empty vessel
In ritual they followed the drummers beat
The pissing cupid juggled and joked
Secretely he conducted a silent tragedy.
A heavy breathe was held

Last night I realised that romantic idealism has for a number of years hindered my views on the approach a painting needs to take in order to fulfill its function. My end goes, primarily, are the same as they always have been. It is the means by which I beleive we get a viewer there which has changed.

I believed that beauty could be enough. That it could provide a temporary release from reality, acting as some kind of antidote, the very antithesis to the everyday. Such an approach actually perpetuates the problem. It ends up discovering a decorative aesthetic which at most provides a brief and pleasant distraction. It becomes another empty glimpse in what is generally a fast paced life without time or attention given to anything. We cannot aloow paintings role to be merely an empty vessel of sensation.

We need to be more aggresive. Painting needs to provide an interuption. It needs to disrupt from the monotony of tangible reality. I am not talking shock or sensation. im talking about something more subtle but which holds someone for longer than a split second of admiration. It needs to make them want to dig deeper, to look longer. Only then can any windows to a deeper experience be opened. Only then can any sensation or aesthetic become more than a pictureque glimpse. We need to make them questions themselves, the paintings, their relation tot he painting. It needs to be excessable but frustratingly never a clsoed door, to keep posing visual and philosophical potential which they don’t fully feel they can get to the bottom of. It needs to alst and then stay with them.

All very obvious, but something I have been ignoring.

Hey, I really liked the timbre of your last written post, I know that this blog isn’t an organised writing session, more like an ideas forum, but its a pleasure to read when you write simply and honestly about concrete ideas, i think this is probably when you are at your written best. As for the little drummer, sounds interesting. I think there is something that is relevant today about the disinterested protagonist, a person who sets the rhythm from a distance, cynical, uncaring, unmoved by the events he/she has set into motion. i can’t quite explain it but the character feels significant. This is why that particular character in my own work has moved from the triangular headed devil in To Want… to the central enlarged child in Mary and Ethel are Thwarted by some Disestablishmentarianism (thats the lighthouse painting) the focus has shifted the character from the periphery to the central figure. For me, i think this has become an important shift. The narrative hasn’t changed as such, but the camera is in a different place, is this a little “reality tv-ish”? Even in The Dance the characterisation has become an important fator. One of the characters can see through the looking glass, out to us, the viewer. You may sense that with knowledge, this character has control, the narrator, understanding the implication of the piece and pointing the viewer towards more meaning.
I hadn’t properly been able to understand this shift until reading your blog, but i believe thats it.

The use of the drip is a device which has art historical implications that are just as significant as painting a figure in a particular style or using a particular symbolic reference.

It may often be presumed as not having a relevance equivalent to other, more historically prescient interventions, however, as painters it is important that we understand where the choices we make have come from in context to this grand historical pursuit we have chosen to follow. It is important that we know the choices previous artists have made and why, thus, through this knowledge we avoid the danger of becoming merely painters of effects, we in turn become a relevant thread in the vast tapestry of this archaic practice.

So to the drip, which I understand made its first significant contribution during the reign of the abstract expressionists in the work of amongst others, Mark Rothko. To this artist, it appears that the drip came to signify the nature of the painting as object. there’s an essay by jeffrey weiss titled Dis-Orientation which sets out to proving this hypothesis, i am not personally interested in proving whether it is right of wrong, but am instead interested in why and what effect this has had on artists today. The painting as object argument is important because it signified the artist moving more deliberately than before, away from using the canvas as the foundation for illusions of space. Manet is perhaps significant in this respect because when we look at his figures they are filled with an absence that was unseen before, which in turn I believe (but without any reading to back my theory up) was inspired by the invention of photography. We can see a subtle shift in Manets work that is corrupting the reflexive light of traditional portraiture moving it towards the surface (reflective) light of photography. The drip is a progression of this movement, it acknowledges that it is acting on a surface by moving across it without the hand of the artist to influence it. It does not ascribe to the conventions of tonality, that suggest shape and 3-dimensionality.

For painters working in the figurative realm today, their intention has been to unify the traditional skills of line and trompe l’oueil alongside the leaps in perception that were made during that extraordinary period of fervant creativity between 1850 and 1970. So with the works of Peter Doig, Matthias Weischer, Daniel Richter and others they have taken the drip and exploited its conventions moving it back towards figuration and illusion, in turns complicating and adhering to the preconceptions of the drip as belonging to the realm of the surface.