It appears that Daniel Richter owes a debt to Doig in his move twoards figurative image making. It was the impact of Doig’s work which seemed to have been the protagonist in moving Richter away from the swirling ‘abstract’ canvases he had been making. Richter’s work is certainly no pastiche though. Through an evolution from his past practise, national tendencies and a certain wit he provides an alternative vision to Doig.

There is something about Richters figurative work which borrows from the aesthetic of his abstractions. I tihnk it is to do with composiotion. I mean composition in a broad sense of the devices used to tie the parts together as a whole.

In both all his work Richters paintings have a musical quality, which seem appropriate form his time spent in that industry. His process of constructing images reminds me of a musician like DJ shadow or James Lavelle. That process of gathering together a sereis of unconnected samples and then tieing them together in a unifeid, even if fragmented, whole. For DJ Shadow it is rhythm which holds together the various voices, melodies and sound clips. For Richter it is the painterly aesthetic which ties the various images and visuals as a whole.

Yet these painterly elements seem to be more expressive nad diverse in his figurative work; which belies the notion of images holding back mark making. I think this is due to the fact that in his abstractions Richter has to create rhythms from the marks, in order to keep the whole connected to the parts. It feels as if they are struggling agasint themselves and constrained by their need to be contained in a pattern based whole. Once he has images to work agasint, stages and figures, then he can apply his materials in any manner he wishes, as long as some semblance of the image is kept alive. This battle between the two create a sereis of problems which necessitate creative responses. The previous problems posed by his abstract works resulted in problems which restricted such creative solutions. None of his abstract works have the vigour and freshness of the splatterings around the central figure below.

The painterly solutions he comes up with are far more dense and intense than Doig. They seem far more German in their form of expression.

His sourcing and use of imagery is different as well. For Doig melancholy and romanticism read Richter’s dark almost crass humour. Again the distinction feels like one connected to nationality. I am not saying its due to inherant genetic conditions, but the kind of traditions from which they draw. More specifically I think it relates to the kind of films, photographs, sourcebooks and artists from which they are inspired.  

…I spoke to that man on the river, even though he refused to say anything. He said he had memories for events that never happened. He wasn’t even real, but I had certainly known him long before we first met each other. I know he wanted me to come closer to see that actually he just a shadow. He was one of those slippery glimpses stuck in amber. I’m glad he tasted so good though. It kind of made that over priced coffee and lost walk around Chelsea worthwhile. It’s slipping; it’s just a browning fruit.  

Criticism is the art of cold, detached, objective analysis. It’s a rather scientific exercise don’t you know. So with a vacuous brain I announce that I thought Peter Doig’s retrospective at Tate Britain to be pretty, well, excellent. He is a painter I had previously, pretentiously, cast off as pretty but shallow-ish. Yet the lie of reproductive prints is revealed when you see his large canvases in the flesh.

Doing was one of the central British artists to actively move away from the uber slick process lead aesthetic painting was moving towards. That overly inward looking for of practise was either looking to kill painting or was celebrating ideals which would inevitably lead to a self mutilation of the practise. Doig moves in a direction which is contemporary in its aesthetic but traditional in that he plays with figures in space to tell stories. His merging of past trends on one canvas is the kind of thing we are told to call post-modern.

Doig’s paintings are not clear, logical or linear narratives. Like all good visual story tellers he does not try and play literature or film making at its own game. Instead they are narratives which are formed from and around the strengths of his practise. They play on stillness, the singular moment in time and position in space, on the flatness of the picture plane and its ability to suggest depth. There is a conscious incompleteness to the stories. It’s as if the props for completion have been stripped away to leave anything more tangible to be tantalisingly elusive. Doig stands like those figures at the gates of some of his paintings. Welcoming us in but blocking our path. They look out with that kind of Maneteque detachment, opening a channel of communication but refusing to communicate.

The exact temporal sequence of events in Doig’s painting is not clear. He doesn’t want it to be. This kind of poetic mystery is paintings create strength. Slippery glimpses into another world. We need not go from A to B like film and literature are designed to. When literature does go for a more mystical and fragmented for of narration it is doing so against its natural desire, I think. Only music has such an innate ability to be so evasive, but music remains so abstract as to never truly succeed in such narrative constructions.

Construction is very much the word for Doig’s images. They are the end product of a multi layered process. He works from memories, photographs, drawings, prints and found images. The works are amalgams of these various parts, assemblages if you like. He montages these together and unites them through plastic structure and the painterly process and surface. Through these formal devices he is able to create a sense of belonging and place from something which is inherently artificial.

Working from photographs puts Doig into a field of contemporary painters all of whom owe a debt to Manet and Bacon. For all these artists it seems there is something unique about photography which they wish to capture but also a necessity to articulate this and convey it through a painterly language. I am not certain what I mean but it feels like a perverse desire to be positioned in a void.

Working from a photograph provides a very different basis to more ‘traditional’ forms of picture making. It is not the construction of abstract elements (line or marks) towards a representational whole. Instead we start with the image and take it on a journey. It’s not a journey which totally detaches said image from its original existence, that’s the role of certain modes of abstraction. Instead it is a case of readjusting the image, of creating a new shadow of reality from a current shadow. Its an analytical manipulation.

This return to figuration is a tendency in many painters of recent times. It is surely a result of the realisation of abstractions myopic chase towards implosion. It is also a realisation that to fully explore the linguistic potential of paint we need a framework to respond to, be it an image, an idea… we need subject matter. It is like the rhymical structure a musician might give himself to direct and extend the experimentation of his melodies. Without such a system we are lost as the supposedly infinite options of a blank canvas paradoxically cause paralysis.

It is certainly clear with Doig that images allow him to extend the language of the medium. Beyond anything it opens up the door for the need, and natural desire, for paint to have multiple references. No longer just paint for its own sake, but for mimetic, emotive, narrative and symbolic purposes. In truth this is what paintings always been about.

Doig’s splatters, sprays, drips, light washes, heavy impasto drags and twists of a hand create makrs which embrace all of these functions. The range of colour supports this; from that deep dark organic green to saturated and acid pink. As a whole there is a kind of romanticism to his use of marks and colours, but they also feel like they exist in the present. This is an instinctive reaction, I can’t fully explain it.

The result of working from photographs presents Doig with problems which result in inventive and captivating results. Consider a number of his figures. Pictorially they often sit in the foreground, the furthest forward of the various elements. Yet they are often the thinnest and furthest layer back. Through an absence there is a presence. Historically it seems call back to Cubism’s formal plays, but harnessed for theatrical ends. Imagine Rachel Whitread but in paint and suggesting narrative rather than making statements. The voided people and objects seem to resonate with an underlying melancholy, metaphors for the paintings as a whole. They tempt us in and give us a sign then deny the reading.

This is directly a result of his manipulation of pre-existing imagery. Rather than constructing and stage onto which we add figures, Doig is starts with a populated stage which he then works away from. As such the figures are not added onto, but can be worked around. They can be created from a negative space left blank as the surrounding is built up. There is a kind of pragmatism in the process which gets us to this poetic outcome.

Such devices are typical of paintings which convey a sense of mystery, often left floating between realms. It seems that the constant focus on the reflective surfaces of rivers and lakes is a kind of metaphor of this.

You need only look at his shimmer reflective surfaces, often rivers. Always these seem to be mimetic and self reflexive. They are a fantastic modern update of the brilliant two fold plays of Monet’s greatest works. That is an incredible complement. Surfaces which offer flatness and depth and an utterly transfixing relationship of mimetic illusion and painterly reality. For both Monet and Doig this offers no contradiction but the chance to create a realm of utter beauty and mystery. The reflective surfaces are, in effect, a visual metaphor of the art of the practise of painting in general.

Doig’s work seems to be about various forms of slippage. Within the construction of parts, the complete whole, are glimmers and glimpses which tease us in. They leave us hovering somewhere between the real and the illusion.

It is through the experience of the images construction that the painrtings seem to create, find or open up the potential for meaning. It seems they are about the flux of life. The flow of the individual through time and space, trying to find sense and makr or of our position within this ‘mortal coil’. The sense of melancholy, the uncertainty, the mystery and unknown all convey a poignant truth of the present state of the human condition. The search for meaning and reason continues but the answers remain elusive.

“If I want to take a picture, I take it no matter what”

I think this statment is crucial to Goldins work. She is certainly an artists whose work begins to make sense when we view it in series. There is a directness, and an intimacy about her work which seems to deny the camera was even present. This is surely a result, paradoxically, of its ever presence. Only by it being a constant can her subjects forget it exists.

The personal and erotic seem to be able to be transfered from a public to a private domain without any of the staging or pornification of other imagery so explicit in content. This is not to say they don’t have drama. The lighting, as she admits, is almost Caravegesque at times.

She is often conpared to Diane Arbus but I tihnk that is lazy. There is an artificiality and personal slant to Arbus’ work which is not so present in GOldin’s. Goldin’s work is far more explicitally about her disapearance adn the capturing of the subject. Arbus seems to project the self onto the subject. This is not a judgement of absolute quality but of relative difference. If we are making judgments though, I prefer Goldin…hence I wrote this blog.

There is something about Ted Hughe’s poetry which I would love to condense into a sticky paste and then vomit back out in visual form. The relationship ebtween literature and painting frustrates me. When someone expresses a certain quality so eloquentally in words the attempt to translate that into a visual equivalent leads to mindless image making nad illustration. I have no interest anymore in taking images from Hughes’ poetry and putting them into my work, as I did with the Crow like figure. The iamges are not what I am after, they are merely the narrative vehicles he uses to capture and convey the essence I admire. Taking the vessel which carries the meaning but pouring out said meaning is kind of ridiculous.

I think, this said, that its Hughes’ ability to capture the dark and underlying tragic themes of humanity with a brutal and cynical accuracy and a stunning wit that I love.

I think Daniel Richter maybe has this in his paintings.

 For your delight here is Ted Hughes’ ‘Crow’s Nerve Fails’ from his collection ‘The Crow’

Crow, feeling his brain slip,
Finds his every feather the fossil of a murder.Who murdered all these?
These living dead, that root in his nerves and his blood
Till he is visibly black?How can he fly from his feathers?
And why have they homed on him?

Is he the archive of their accusations?
Or their ghostly purpose, their pining vengeance?
Or their unforgiven prisoner?

He cannot be forgiven.

His prison is the earth. Clothed in his conviction,
Trying to remember his crimes

Heavily he flies.

Ted Hughes

My work has no space in it, no space at all.  How depressing this is.  I don’t really know how to get space in them. Maybe you need to be able to see the floor, you don’t see the floor in many of the paintings.  how the hell do i expect to play with space when there is none.  maybe the colour climate has something to do with this as well.  and i persistantly fail to succeed in creating colour climates.  insanity levels= 10.

Have just written an artists statement as I needed one for a few things. I thought it would be an interesting exercise to upload, as over time we will then have a history of statements. I think it will provide an interesting formal documentation of how my work changes; or more importantly how my articulation or thoughts on it change. You would hope both would get more sophisticated over time, but that’s being very optimistic. Anyway, statment attached below. (currently working on putting both profiles; on this website, together, should be finished by the end of the week.)

My Practise seems to gravitate towards recurring figural motifs; often seen falling or floating between two realms. Occasionally a protagonist will appear. Architectural constructions, systems of grids and geographic reference points provide the stage upon which these actors attempt to perform. No longer connected to pre-existing, bastardised, narratives, they have to find their own scripts. These normally revolve around a sense of tragedy, paused transience or lose. Presented in such an ambiguous context they hope to reveal, to the artist and viewer, allegories and meta-narratives.

Imagery is found through a synthetic construction of parts and processes. Paint is explored in a wish to reveal its full linguistic potential as a signifier with the ability to have multiple references without contradiction. Paint as paint, as flesh, as emotive vehicle, symbolic source of light and narrative prop. The organic nature of paint interacts with the more solid, preordained geometric structures which sit below. An attempt to find harmony between these two melodies, painterly process and plastic construction, is what hopefully gives the work some dramatic tension.

Other detritus are manipulated and collaged together to interplay with the nature of the medium. Newspaper cutting, drawings, maps, receipts and found materials are all brought together. Some arrive loaded with meaning, other find meaning and often any pre-existing meaning is half emptied. All of the above elements are organised across the actual two dimensional space and within the constructed three dimensional realm with a desire to stage manage our reading.

The neurosis to paint means any written or logical justification is hard to articulate. Broadly I know I am attempting to personally respond to a history of image makers and painters. Whilst constantly changing I dispute certain historical claims of paintings evolution and instead see more continuous histories which underlie the practise. For instance, painters have always been interested in the truth that painting is both self reflexive (celebrating the spreading of a medium over the surface) and a conveyor of meaning beyond itself (a window onto another world). Neither facet is singularly observed by any artist, whatever writers like Vasari or Greenberg might suggest. As such we are not necessarily in a unique position as twenty first century painters, able to refer to both, but are part of a longer lineage. I arrogantly, therefore, attempt to respond to this long history. From Titian, through Carravagio, Rembrandt, Rubens, Poussin, David, Gericault, Delacroix, Manet through to the Cubism of Picasso and Braque, the ‘abstractions’ of Rothko and Pollock and the work of Francis Bacon. I am starting to understand how other contemporary painters respond to this. Painters such as Matthias Weischer, Callum Innes, Howard Hodgkin, Brian Graham, Tapies, Neo Rausch, Peter Doig and Hughie O’Donoghue. In all cases it is the construction of space, figural narrative and the importance of the medium which I seem to draw greatest interest from.

Beyond such pretentious and academic reasoning I see my work as an attempt to find eternal and specific metaphors for the human condition. The nameless solo figures can become vehicles of mans plight. The permanent tragic themes of memory lose and a struggle to transcend reality is searched for. More specific contemporary conditions underpin the images. The uncertainty of current political, philosophical and personal contexts seems to inform my work.  Meaning, for me, is not a preconceived thesis but a poetic discovery, found from the dialectical relationship between paintings internal and external frame of reference. From the specific conditions of the practise metaphysical notions can be revealed.

gordon comstock is thinking about his only published book of poems.

He thought with loathing of that sneaky little foolscap octavo.  those forty or fifty drab, dead little poems, each like a little abortion in its labelled jar.

i just think this little piece of hate filled writing is simply fantastic.  i wish i could speak with as much eloquence in my paintings about the experience of failure as he does in his prose.  the language is so visceral (i should mention that the rest of the book so far is equally as good, i just couldn’t be arsed writing more out) and unapologetic.  Its incredibly brave.

on an upshot from my uneloquent failures, i’ve had a certain amount of success with the glazing of a little work called downhill.  I glazed the majority of the surface with a delicate rose and then the slope with aureolin.  the slope was white with a tiny amount of viridian and once glazed it truly took off against the warm and cool reds of the rest of the pic.  so much so that i initially wiped off the aureolin in panic at its intensity.  until after some deliberation i reapplied an even more gentle glaze of aureolin, and now i look at it, i’m incredibly happy with the result.

The sun has moved now inexorably along its path and can be seen glowing through my window,  if you care to look.  Its blinding.  I think I may have to move now, or soon, just so i can again see something, anything.

Mary was writing on a pad, on a desk.  Her scrawl was mesmerizing, the type of writing they only had in the old days.  you don’t get that type of writing anymore, people just don’t take the time to practice.

The square couldn’t contemplate the possibility of being a cube, transfixed as it were by the confines of its own existence.  The whale just had time enough to contemplate the beauty of its own existence, before it ceased to be a whale.  And a mayfly struggles to understand the concept of existence when placed inside the infinitly vast yet confined experiences of a rock.

I struggle to understand how she can breathe in that thing, she still looks elegant though, even if her stomach is a tit and her kidneys are her arse.  Plaintive though, melancholy, but oh so beautiful.  I bet my hands could reach all the way round there and touch fingertips.  And my hands aren’t even that big, in fact they’re really small.  I have tiny hands.

It takes ages to paint.

The sun has gone again now.  It keeps doing that, and then coming back again.  I do miss it when its not there, or here.  It doesn’t seem to last long when its here.  need to remember to enjoy it while it lasts.  even if it does hurt.  The iron man says the same. Ted says that pain is cathartic. the iron man burnt his bottom, so i wonder if he’d still say the same.  he probably would, it all makes sense that way.

Its with a cloying heart that he wishes to be remembered

But one filled with organic olive oil.