Bloody hell tom you don’t half love challenging my powers of concentration by shoving everything up at once.

First of all i’m gonna quote francis bacon again and say “if something can be explained in words it isn’t worth painting”. this is the biggest trump card painting has over all other art forms. unfortunately it seems to now mean that a painting can be deliberately obtuse, indecipherable for the sake of it, or that the artist doesn’t need to contemplate its own meaning, this is far from the truth and it leads to neanderthals making claims that this thus makes painting easy. the difficulty i think is in understanding what we need to pin point in terms of understanding our own practice, how do we set ourselves along the journey of improving our work without overindulging intellectualisms that in actuality hinder the painting? communication is the first intention for all art forms, as painters i think we have to start from a very loose stand point, something which is simple, eg what is it about this image which intrigues me? Now, what next? Do we begin to ask why and what? I’m beginning to think no, perhaps this was a lingering misconception from studentdome, the need to over-vocabularise every little nuance (I’m thinking back to my ridiculous 30min end of year talk here). A more important question may be how? Painting is at heart a craft, and craft is built on the development of technique, painting being one of the more complex crafts incorporates a range of techniques. The next question we need to ask is, why has this bit of painting made me happy/unhappy? By asking this question we are attempting to refine what it is we are painting about without entering into the limit-defining belly of the talkybeast. In essence, we are listening to our feelings rather than our learning. when we begin to ascribe specifying words to an action, we are actually taking the easy route out because we are reaching defined dead ends, and these are satisfying because it makes us feel we’ve done something clever, we’ve completed something. but painting doesn’t have dead ends, it isn’t a narrative with a beginning middle and end, it just simply is, and this ‘is’ is open ended and mysterious. As with peter doig, you may be able to look back over his whole oeuvre and see a progressing personal narrative, but in a single image you do not. by asking how does this make me happy, we are trying to find a certain truth to our own practice and through that, to our own personal make-up and perhaps even to a truth about about the society we exist in. if we are successful we may just be able to peel away one of those pesky veils of untruth that cloud our everyday existence.
does this mean that when a painting is finished it is ok to analyse your subjective intent?

Andy, as promised some info of the better acrylic mediums I have used.

Still struggling to find a really good hard molding paste. I want something similar to plaster but more felxible and possibly which will take colour. At the moment I still have problems with the texture, cracking and greyness of the ones I have used (both Golden and AV)

AV Acrylic artist medium (matt and gloss)- basically works as an alternative to water. The colour runs through it with more consistency and therefore the coverage is better. But I find it a tiny bit too sticky at times and have actually not ordered more as I will return to water combined with other mediums.

Jacksons Acrylic, polymer Varnish (gloss and matt) A thinnner version of alkaflow, but for acrylics…opbviously. Too shiny when glossy but I am tending to reduce my surfaces to matt in general anyway. Despite this is gives a great body and weight to the colours. It provides a beauituflly desne layer to run other colours thourgh and also is great for glazes. Again perhaps a little too sticky, i would like it to run, without the addition of water, at a slightly greater pace. Very good value for money though.

AV Heavy GEll matt- a cheaper version to the golden equivalent. The difference in quality is not hugely notable to my undescerning eye. Thcik and dries transparent. Great for anything from impasto pastes to transluscent glazes. It love half mixing my colours into this then laying it down, so the colour sit through a depth of medium. It seems to work. The matt version, when mixed down with watter and zinc white, provides a great mist like veil across the surface.

Image Maker- have decided I am more interested in the destruction of imagery than its construction. In losing it not finding it. Its a choice between a synthetic mode and an analytical one. So for the moment this provides a great moment to lay down a clear graphic image and then start to play with it. Receipts and maps are the current source of fascination with this particular devise. I have me reasons but am trying not to over theorise it during this exploratory stage.

Colours- I have been sticking with Golden as a rule as I want the depth of pigment they provide. At the moment I am working around these colours

Alizarin Crimson
Golden Transparent Yellow Iron Oxide
Golden Transparent Red Oxide
Daler Rowney Interference Colour-shimmering gold (can actually be used with real subtelty when added to a wash or glaze. Also great for a kind of kitsch interuption to the surface)
Golden Ultramarine Blue
Golden Colbalt Blue
Golden Burnt Umber
Golden Burnt Sienna
Daler Rowney Zinc White (not had a direct comparison but would get this one again)
Have just purchased an AV Titanium White as the Liquitex (I think) one I had was nice and thick but when you tried to reduce it down it did not break up very well
Hansa Yellow Medium

 like the Kettles Yard aesthetic, where we can sit down, flick through books. The browse again, then have a sit, then browse again. It all feels very natural.

Studio enviroment
I like the idea of my work being in a space where [perhaps people could spend a good deal of time. Perhapsa sit and have a coffee (not in a shop as such), listen to some music, have some sofas or chairs which they could position in front of paintings to spend a bit of time. Perhaps have a load of related material around, book collections of the artist, music collection. I don’t know how this could work without it feeling contrived. I suppose the best way is to have an artists studio where occasionally he presents a load of work for viewing but also leaves the space pretty much as it nomrally would be. Fuck knows, the current situation just feels a bit false though. ARGHHHHHHHHHHHH

Bloody hell tom you don’t half love challenging my powers of concentration by shoving everything up at once.

First of all i’m gonna quote francis bacon again and say “if something can be explained in words it isn’t worth painting”. this is the biggest trump card painting has over all other art forms. unfortunately it seems to now mean that a painting can be deliberately obtuse, indecipherable for the sake of it, or that the artist doesn’t need to contemplate its own meaning, this is far from the truth and it leads to neanderthals making claims that this thus makes painting easy. the difficulty i think is in understanding what we need to pin point in terms of understanding our own practice, how do we set ourselves along the journey of improving our work without overindulging intellectualisms that in actuality hinder the painting? communication is the first intention for all art forms, as painters i think we have to start from a very loose stand point, something which is simple, eg what is it about this image which intrigues me? Now, what next? Do we begin to ask why and what? I’m beginning to think no, perhaps this was a lingering misconception from studentdome, the need to over-vocabularise every little nuance (I’m thinking back to my ridiculous 30min end of year talk here). A more important question may be how? Painting is at heart a craft, and craft is built on the development of technique, painting being one of the more complex crafts incorporates a range of techniques. The next question we need to ask is, why has this bit of painting made me happy/unhappy? By asking this question we are attempting to refine what it is we are painting about without entering into the limit-defining belly of the talkybeast. In essence, we are listening to our feelings rather than our learning. when we begin to ascribe specifying words to an action, we are actually taking the easy route out because we are reaching defined dead ends, and these are satisfying because it makes us feel we’ve done something clever, we’ve completed something. but painting doesn’t have dead ends, it isn’t a narrative with a beginning middle and end, it just simply is, and this ‘is’ is open ended and mysterious. As with peter doig, you may be able to look back over his whole oeuvre and see a progressing personal narrative, but in a single image you do not. by asking how does this make me happy, we are trying to find a certain truth to our own practice and through that, to our own personal make-up and perhaps even to a truth about about the society we exist in. if we are successful we may just be able to peel away one of those pesky veils of untruth that cloud our everyday existence.
does this mean that when a painting is finished it is ok to analyse your subjective intent?

Finally, at last… ‘Drummer Boy’, ‘Dane IV’ and ‘The Sinner and the Child’ are complete. They have been worked, reworked, killed, brought back to life and cahgned so many times that I have been driven close to despair.

I have no true comprehension if they are any good at the moment but they are finished. They ar not finished becasue i am fed up, or becasue I have lacked the bravery to push them the extra yard. Whatever their faults both those points have been well and truly past. They may be many things from shit to pointless, but they are definately finished.

Will photograph and upload soon.

Now awaiting the arrival of my paper to get cracking on a long awaited series of small works which I am most terribly excited about don’t you know old sir me chap

Beauty in the traditional sense is, despite general claims, a fairly easy thing to describe. In art terms (and the logic spreads to other forms of culture) it is the ability of a piece of work to fulfill a set of values which society has decided make something beautiful.

This issue only gets complicated when the rules change or their foundations are fundamentally attacked. The rise of postmodernism and the progression of various theoretical disciplines in the later half of the 20th Century seemed to have been the final nail in the coffin of beauty.

In painterly terms the Modernist Canon had (supposedly) neatly replaced the classical canon with a new model of beauty. Yet once its values were showed to be bankrupt its process of measuring beauty became vacuous.

It seems slightly ironic that in a time when so much is centred on superficial appearances that we have lost any real sense of what true beauty is. In effect we have been told such a concept is flawed. That no permanent notion exists, that it is merely fleeting attempts to justify what one particular segment of one particular society at one partoicular moment in time believes to be beautiful.

I would like to suggest that there are actually more permanentr values. That beauty does exist in more permanent forms. The essence of beauty lies in mankind itself. We are inherently selfish. OUr conception of reality is formed by the existence of matter in relation to the self. That more transient forms of beauty have existed merely reaffirms that it is a concept inherantly linked to our own phyche.

To find more eternal forms of beauty, therefore, we need to search for certain qualities that remain permanent in us…and from their we can find values which last.

I want to dash off on a tangent here. I want to give an example of what I see as beautiful Why is thom Yorkes wobbling voice with its breaks is beautiful…

I started to write the rest of this then realised how utterly self indulgent and pretentious it was. It seems worthwhile to leave it at this point.

The source material for my painting is, thankfully, finally expanding. The process feels refreshingly natural. I have also learnt that I am sourcing things without seeing them as ever directly infilltrating into my work. The detritus of modern life, the mass of imagery we are exposed to, the frsutration with governmental systems, social/political and philosophical beliefs, my own current phycological make up and our everyday experiences are all finding there way into the fabric of my works creation.

I see this as being the final break from my idealistic belief, previously, in abstraction, autonomy and a solopsistic closed door on association. We are a product of our time and attempting to deny this is pointless.

This is not to say my work explitically deals with, describes or addresses the various speciifc sources. It is more a case that they provide a framework from which it emereges. I will give a few examples to try and illustrate my point.

1) The other day at the swimming pool I did a few lengths under water. A few always capture my attention when I do this; the sight of other shadowy figures cutting through the water, the backwards raining of bubbles as our hands slice the water, the glow of the underwater lights as we get cloers to one end. As I became consciously aware of this fascination I decided to do a few underwater tests. I dropped under water and brethed out untill I sank. The feeling of weightlessness, the moment when just enough air as left me so i float then sink, felt both relaxing and strangely moving. For that second, however pretentious, it felt like a kind of epic moment in an empty narrative.

The end of this little playful process saw me breathing out whilst on my back, untill I fel to the bottom of the pool, lying on my back. From there I watched as the bubbles from my mouth made their journey slowly to the surface. There they broke, a flurry of meaningless Icarus like forms. I raised a foot to touch the skin of the water, ripples and lines spilt across what appeared to me as a ceiling. It felt like cloud watching in some kind of other universe.

It strikes me, in hindsight, how this relates to some of my work. The direct links to upcoming floating and sinking figures is actually the link of least significance. The visual connection to my delght for bits of paint floating amoungst viscous varnished patches is also not necessarily relevant. It is some more continuous connections which fascinate me at this moment. The desire for non functional experiences and sensations over logical and reasoned thought. (yes, very Keatsian kitsh I know) The ability to find, in the most banal and unimportant of situation, a little temporary and fleeting escape from tangible reality.

2) Paperwork at college. I have already discussed this issue in some, boring, depth, in a previous post. In this instance I want to consider how it is part of my wider dislike for an over centralised government. Without Daily Mail like scare mongering I see this as a march towards a contunally more Orwellian state. Its a fucking disgrace. With power mad men at the top controlling what happens below them (well the hierachy consider it below when logic says it is beyond, its a horizontal relationship, not the vertical one New Labour has made it) They seem intent on creating limiting and restrive systemmatic blueprints. It results in a situation where you may as well have machines filling these posts. The cloining of a process results in a dumbing down of the work done, a lack of variety in approaches. in regards to lecturing and tutoring a grose irony exists. The systems are put in place to supposedly put the ‘learning’ (what ai disgustingly poliitcally correct term) first but actually result in them receving a narrow education. The long term prognosis is a dumbing down of the pupils as well. (and the fucking noisey moron sat opposite me does nothing to deter me from this conclusion) This is unfair to allinvovled.

This kind of connection is perhaps the most distnace from my work itself. Yet in some way, which i can’t artiuclate at this moment, I see my work as emerging from such frustrations. Not as a direct commnent upon but as something which is formed from and responds too this kind of situation. A denial of this is unhelpful.

Some more to say on this but I need to get on an write my museums lecture. I have yet to decide how much to tone down its overtly anti establishment tone. Currently I am using it as the framework to comment on the ludicours beurocracy previously mentioned. The link is not as tenuous as it might sound.

Thanks Tom, those comments have been really helpful, they’ve given me confidence to go with the mask of mary, i’ve been questioning myself because there is no-one around here who can give me a comment that i feel i can listen to.

Was having more of a look at The drummer boy piece, and I’ll reiterate that i think it’s very exciting, that doesn’t necessarily mean its brilliant but it does mean that there is something in it which makes you want to look at it for longer than just a few seconds. this is what i believe painting has to aspire to, i don’t necessarily go with the whole painting should echo life and therefore we should all be producing the throwaway Warhol image. That said, we spoke briefly about beginning to use found images from mags, newspapers etc, in essence, the throwaway image, but i think the way these separate images are organised together should have a considered quality. Using the plethora of imagery that saturates contemporary society is certainly the way forward though. As francis bacon said “using the detritus from the studio floor”, that slowly accumulated apparatus of imagery from everyday life, that an artist slowly gathers over a period of time and that has specific yet complex personal resonance.
I think the presence of the drummer boy as protagonist has real contextual clarity, it adds an extra impetus to matisse’s dance, that famous symbol of freedom has now soured, the dancers are not free, liberated but in fact under the influence of the ‘other’. as the great bob dylan says, everybody’s gotta serve somebody!
on another subject, really, how good is Bacon! i can’t think of a painter who surpasses him for power of image, others may be level but surely non surpass on a regular basis, and try to think of a painter who is so different from any other and so impossible to base any of your own practice on. he seems to have travelled as far as painting can go down his own personal path, the only way to use him is to back track down the path.

Firstly, congrats. I am so impressed how brave you have been. You have worked on this piece, I tihnk, longer than any other. Added to that you seem to believe, and I think I agree, that its your best. That dedication of time and attachment to its quality means that making any alteration takes bravery. To totally alter sections of the painting shows you are prepared to push into the unknown, to step over the edge. The success or failure of that move is actually not to important, the fact your prepared to do it is key I think.

I think you have be rewarded. I think it is a far better picture. My gut instinct says it has a colouristic clarity and weight which was lacking before. Without seeing it in the flesh that is hard to elaborate on.

The change to Mary’s face is fantastic (i think). From actual specific character to a more mysterious, mask, ethereal embodiment of a wider concept. She is more challenging, more obrassive… she causes a greater interuption in the visual spectacle. The weight of focus has shifted.

The dog seems better, or am I going mad. It seems better painted and even wittier because of it. I see wit as a growing concern in my own work and soemthing you seem to be finding with great ease at the moment. Your own personal dark wit has filtered into areas of your painting. Long may it continue, as long as it remains uncontrived.

The floor is great. I love the unreality of it. It works in terms of spatial depth but then denies total entry. It seems capable of falling apart, its very construction revealed. Christ knows what I mean, its excellent though.

I am actually shattered and so therefore incoherent. I have a load of blogs to write but no time. I wanted to make sure I wrote this one tonight though, so apologies for lack of quality.

I am jealous as I think this is a really good painting.

On another point. I think I might have finished my best two paintings to date tonight. I might wake up in the morning and think they are shit.

I still need to finish drummer boy, I have a feeling he will continue to frustrate me. Particuarly as it is the closest (in style not quality) to your work, and I will feel inadequate whatever. Oh well. ‘Happy days’ (as my friend Tim Snaith says)

brave- impressed. willing to stand on the edge. The success or failure is actually unimportant, its that bravery that is key.

conception of the painting is the same, so I wont comment to much there

the masked face- its great. It turns her from an actual specific character to a more mysterious, ethereal emobodiment of something wider.

Awaiting me on my desk is a list of blog posts I have been meaning to write. Rather than gradually work my way thrrew them the list has grown by the day. I would love to say this is a result of a fervent imagination, unable to keep pace with the ideas which pour out of my head. It isn’t. Instead I have been delayed by the paperwork which comes with my lecturing role.

I understand and appreciate the need for paperwork of this kind. It enables the teacher to plan ahead, the students and college to be aware of what you have planned and for wider institutional accountablity. All very well in theory.

Yet the purpose of such activities should be to support and enrich the quality of lecturing and, therefore, learning. Yet it seems to have arrived at a point where it is doing the exact opposite. Hours are dedicated to the painstaking details, political correctness, codified and structured nature of the mass of forms. Schemes of work, Lesson Plans, Project Briefs…all more anal in format than a monkeys arse.

I make no bones about the fact that I see this as a direct result of governmental over managemenet. The last ten years has seen us move towards what at times feels a near Orwellian state. Such scaremonggering terminology might sound Daily Mailish, but the reality is just as stark. This government seem obsessed with over controlling the individuals, organisations and instiutions below them. Its a near dictatorial approach to management.

This fails becasue it leaves politicians (who lets face it are normaly people who have failed at something else) to structure systems they know nothing about. Power is centralised and those who understand their profession are left powerless.

The knock on effect is that people are not in a position to dedicate their time and energy to the fundamental aspects of their job. As a lecturer I find myself having to spend as much time on functionless paperwork as I do on actual preperation and delivery of the lectures. The later is surely what I am paid to do. Yet those at the very top (the government) are obsessed with being able to measure our acheivements.

The irony is two fold.

1) The form of measurment is invlaid on a number of counts. Firstly as the very systems themselves seem flawed and the mode of analysising the infomration tends to be statisitical. Statisitcs are, I believe, flawed by their very nature.

2) So much time is taken up by the paperwork which provides the foundation for assesment that eventually no one will be doing the very thing they are meant to be being assesed for. We will be measuring nothing and using statistics to say how well we did that nothing. Brilliant.

End note: as a more specific example to my general rant I would like to reference the form I have to fill in for lesson plans. I think it should be essential to have lesson plans but the format and structure of them should almost entirely be left up to the teacher. Inrea lity I almost have my whole lecture planned for me. Ten Minutes at the start to recap from last week. Five minutes after to tell them what they can acheive today. You then need to split that into three levels for the range of ability in the class. They are even specific about how to display the information. At the end of the lesson you have to recap what you have just learnt, again with clear guidelines of how to do this. Its as patronising to everyone invovled as those programs on telly which insist on telling you before and after every ad break what you have seen or are about to see.In the end the seeing takes up about five percent of the hour.

What happened to trust? What happened to autonomy? WHat happened to variety and flexibility? What happened to the idocincratic approach? If you insist on your lectureres becoming machines or monkeys, with no ability to think for themselves, then it is only logicazl that the students will become a weak reflection of this depressing vision.

Progress? Don’t make me laugh.