Just an upload of some useful comments Ben sent me in an email today… with my response at the bottom…
…It seems like at the moment you are working hard to resolve a tension between the painterly abstract values which would seem to underpin your pre-cambridge work and the interjection of figurative elements which you have been playing with since your return to paint. It would seem essential to your development to work through this, and the freedom with which you are now working undoubtedly reflects an internal need for experimentation.
Personally I am not convinced the path will be an easy one. I tend to find the combination conceptually troublesome; with the experience of viewing all too often complicated by the two means of reading the work (eg our current show of ***** *****,the photos beneath fight with the meaningless abstract doodles above, rather than being synergenic)..collage and appropriation though would seem to provide an interesting means of working through the desire for external reference whilst preserving a focus on surface…you seem to have discovered this.
In general it seems like you are working in the right direction. Your ritual of a drummer boy seems to transcend the decorative facility of the swimmers and point towards a more evocative style. which incorporates your technical ability as a painter as well as an evocation of emotion. Between Somewhere and Nowhere III and an A-Z of loss I also like. Image and form in E minor and Ritual dance of the drummer boy I also like a lot. I think in these works I see less tension between abstraction and figuration because the two seem to work together. The conceptual ambiguity (or perhaps looseness?) of the swimmers is, for me, more troublesome. In general though your experimentation would seem to be aiming to resolve issues at the core of your purpose…good on ya.
An aside: ***** ****** (our last show) experimented with collage before leading into Hard edge abstraction. I can see a sort of Greenbergian merit in it….
P.s. I’m very much in an abstract painting frame of mind at the moment I think
what dyou reckon??
….Some quick thoughts in return…
“I think in these works I see less tension between abstraction and figuration because the two seem to work together”
You have hit the nail on the head here in terms of what I am trying to do. You are also correct about ‘Image and Form in E Minor’, despite being a really quick and early work it does this. I think this is what all painters strive for and what good paintings acheive. I seem to always refer to it as the musical nature ofpaint, when it is able to harmonise the various references of the medium, with the parts working together rather than agasint. Its why I loved Titian, it as if the formal qualities of the paint and the mimetic function work together in order to provide a depth and resonance to the narrative whole. Its what makes them poetic to me. There is absolutely no contradiction between the seperate parts but an utterly necessary interplay.
I think this comes about when the artist has not self consciously seperated the elements in there head and then tried to tie them back together, which I clealry do at points…resulting sloppy and contrived images. In some sense Titian had an advantage, pre abstraction he was able to appreciate the formal qualities of the medium but not have ever seen those be celebrated entirely on their own grounds. Yet equally his explicitally Venetian style looked to find image in the medium, rather than the Vasarin, Central Italian example where mimesis looked to purge any evidence of the artists hand or the mediums existence. For Titian the mimeiss was formed in and created by the paint. The shimmer layers and open strokes giving an illusionisitic vibration which could create a sense of flesh breathing of light shaking. It was in this realisation that he was able to capture a depth and variety of human existnece which i don’t think has ever been surpassed in painting. It is this, surely, which makes him Shakespearian.
I digress…
In terms of my own work I am trying to refind a point, in terms of the creative process, where my subject allows the technical range of paint to be fully explored, but because the subject demands it. What I don’t want is an image, subject, narrative which exists on one level with a kind of egotistical splattering of painterly masturbation over the top of it.
That said, I do want to openly embrace something Andy mentioned. That is the ability to have numerous styles and ways of making sitting alongside each other. But the key, and maybe its a grey area, is to find it so that these juxtapositions and implosions work together in the interest of the whole score (going back to paitning as music) rather than being a success on their own but a kind of vomitted mess together. I find the potential search for this exciting, its like a balancing act where it can all slip off into chaos or all come together to make total ’sense’.
As a quick connected not to this, I am also attempting at the moment to conscioulsy play a solid (we can call it classical it is ambition) geometric structure agasint an organic (we can call it Romantic if we so wish) play of form, colour and medium over the top. I certain don’t wish to see images as existing entirely on one side of this fance or another, but between the two.
If I can find that point, where things hover between various existences, than I think I am getting close to ticking on a box or two in my head. The worry is that at this stage I talk a grand game but am only literally starting to make some head way visually.
I am writting a bit of an expansive blog at the moment which tries to make sense of my continued search for subject matter. Hopefully this sits together with this kind of discussion about the ways of actually constructing an image.
Christ knows. Anyway, thanks for your input, very interesting. Might see you Friday as I am down in the smoke to see the Peter Doig show, how exciting. (he does all these things I spoke about…I think)
