The disengeuous urchin, by his nature, is undone by the Pink Lady… again and again…

…Its the same everytime. We believe in it because it satisfies an urge. The empty void society and self has made needs filling. Its a self fullfilling fuck up. So we continue, blindly.

It grows. The boy in the head sniggers, thinking of the phallis as always…but with other names. It gorws in the head, to what it should be. It never is that though. Its a lust for flesh which we call that other name. Intangible makes it sound mysterious and hides its nonexistence. Its our secular god, the unreal reason in a reasonless existence.

This ends, this falseness. Then we are left spinning again. Srambling within ourselves on the floor. Screaming as if fallen. But we never even left the ground to start with. But the silence of the plataeu lacks the poetry of the rise and fall, however artificial that is.

Our mediocirty is denied, cast into the cynics pillow. We romanticise and aggrandise our emotional impotence. The grand monologue of loves great tragedy sounds so much better in our imaginary daily epitaph.

The truth brings far more despair than the hollywood melodrama we create. This pathetic, narcissistic emptiness.

So the cycle continues. So the cycle continues. We spiral within ourselves searching for something real. We soffocate and drown in the empty journey for breath.

Deleuze expresses those elements of Bacon which I knew but could not articulate and then of adding in layers of interpretation which had previously been closed to me.

In chapter one of his seminal text he accurately asserts how Bacon composes the painting as ‘a kind of amphitheatre os place’. A stage which is used to to ‘isolate the figure’.

He goes on to talk about Bacon’s search for something beyond illustration and narration. Beyond the showing of what is seen or the telling of a story. Bacon searches for something uniquely painterly in his figuration, rather than competing with phtoography or literature. It is his isolation of the figure which Deleuze recognises Bacon’s ability to find this seperation of image from these two explicit functions. No longer merely a part of the whole but an object in its own right which we have to engage with directly. Deleuze articulates this perfectly, and then some.

‘Narration is the correlate of illustration. A story always slips into, or tends to slip into, the space between two figures in order to animate the illustrated whole. Isolation is thus the simplest means, necessary but not sufficient, to break with representation, to disrupt narration, to escape illustration, to liberate the Figure: to stick to the fact’

In my head an analogy seems to come to mind with music. This is no longer the note or the actor which is merely there to serve the composition or the script. This is the note nad actor on its own, paused and extended into a monologue of intense experience for the viewer.

Storyless we are left to deal with the thing in itself. It is an intensity and a focus which is capable of peeling back our skin and tapping directly into our system. It is painting on its own terms without the need for pure abstraction.

Bacon’s 1952 ‘Study of a dog’ is a work which does all of the above. Here Bacon readdresses a recurring specific motif in his work. The dog sits within a staged space. Twisting within itself with no other figures for its actions to relate too. It heroically spins and shakes in front of the small street scene in the backgroun. Seperated by the broad red stage it forces attention to remain on its form. The dark green cricle in which is performs seems to see it reach within itself.

Its disturbing and restless. It gives us no break, no justification, no point of departure. We are kept at this viscious moment without release untill our greedy eyes seek a pause outside the canvas. It leaps beyond the limits of dry, formal or narrative analysis. It penetrates to a place deeper, more human and more disturbing.

“The idea as a point of departure for the picture: that’s illustration.  Conversely, acting and reacting in the absence of an idea leads to forms that can be named and explained, and thus generates the idea.  (’In the beginning was the deed.’)

The last post was really a preamble for a recent observation I made about the Pink Lady composition. (the above is the sketch for a larger painting I am currently working on)

I have managed, recently, to work without the suffocating influence of preconceived art historical/theoretical references. My descision making process has attempted to be more instinctive, from both iconographic to painterly choices.

What is interesting is when these choices, in hidsight, seem to play with the kind of art historical references which I had chosen to block out.

The following could all well be a splurge of pretentious and projected nonsense. Yet I am happier that it came from the process rather than guided the process. That seems a slightly more hoenst approach.

As my last post proposed art history has traditionally assinged certain gender role to particular figural dynamics. The male being the assertive, errect, active, heroic form. The female the horizontal, submissive, erotic receiver of the gaze.

In ‘The Pink Lady’ I was surprised to see how totally I seem to have inverted this, without any conscious reference.

Here the female is vertical. She is the powerful protagonist. Her sexuality seems not to be the subject of the male gaze the the cause of his fall. She is a statue but the controller of the mini narratives which surround her. Umoving and solid she is matryachal.

 The male figure is horizontal. He is either faller or lying on the floor as the result of a decline. He is the victim of the females sexuality, the product of a tragic certainty. He has no control and is defined by that which surrounds him.

I don’t want to go too much further than this, because I feel these observations are, in the main, accurate. To attempt to justify, explain or find out why would be to move onto the pretentions of sociological or philosophical analysis.

 I certainly know, and it worries me. That this dillema resonates with highly personal psychological realities. It could also be argued that it has wider reverberations with certain gender power plays in life. But to go down that road is to risk making vague generalisations. All I know is that for the first time in a long time an aspect of my work disturbs me.

Iconographic signification is the product of historical repetition. The gender associations of certain figural dynamics are an example of this. Michelangelo’s ‘David’ and Titian’s ‘Venus of Urbino’ are both the product and the provider of limiting and particular gender roles in visual culture. They provide a high renaissance iconic fulfilment of a historical continuum that was largely unchallenged until the 20^th century.

For Michelangelo’s ‘David’ read the archetypal male: Tall, erect, vertical, active and heroic. The fulfilment of Vasari’s male dominated aesthetic, a worked under pinned by a power of ‘desegno’, that supposedly masculine trait of intellectual rigour.

For Titian’s ‘Venus of Urbino’ read the archetypal female. Most depressingly a type seemingly formed by its opposition to the male, not through autonomy. Here we have the horizontal, the reclining, the submissive eroticism; the receiver of the male gave.

The relationship between reality and art is not as simple as the one way mirror people believe. Art also feeds back into society. The formation of such clear gender principles in visual form is obviously the product of limiting social modes of gender engagement. The product of a species which needs to have clarity and order so finds it easier to create a two way hierarchy between the sexes.

Art does not just reflect this back to us. It helps imbed the notion more firmly into our consciousness, leading us to believe the artificially constructed ideals as being intrinsic facts of the human condition. When you have as iconic models as those of Titian and Michelangelo, which remain celebrated through history, than it is very hard to shake of the constrains of such an image. Art is both formed from what we have made ourselves and both helps mould us. It is a far more active agent of social power than many people give it credit for. In this case it is still a shackling influence we are trying to escape from.

I am very aware that I have not written much up here recently. Reasons for this seem to be three fold.

Firstly the dull reality of life, in that other things get in the way.

Both the other reasons are more directly linked to my practise.

 I have been working on small ’sketch’ like paintings for a little while now. The freedom it brought has certainly helped me make some steps forwards. I think forwards, at the least some steps in a direction.

It became clear that certain areas were developing which were calling out to be explored in a more considered and larger scale format. Groups were forming which each require at least one attempt at a larger articulation.

 Swimmers/floaters, protagonists with faller, fallers and windows/walls. Yet I seemed paralysed, in capable of making the choice as to which elements form which sketches would provide the structure for larger works.

I started to do a sereis of small sketches which attempted to harness the strengths of various other sketches, in order to make choices for the larger works.

This was flawed on two levels. Firstly my painting searches for, and works best when it has only pointers for the end, not unbreakable structures. Secondally I was delaying the need to be brave, to just start, to jump into the unknown. Procrastination at its worse.

On Tuesday I finally took the jump. Four larger works have begun and seem to be drawn from but not obsessively reliant on the sketches which precede them. The five canvas awaits as the faller and flaoter works (of which it will be one) have not reached any form of clarity in the sketches yet.

 The paintings being worked on are as follows:

 1) ‘The pink lady and the faller’, based on two sketches of the same name. I have alreadyt made some deviations on the colour rnage which worked so well int he sketch. It is started to provide a platofrm to explore the range of colours and surfaces which I have been searching for. Hopefully these can corolate to the nature of emotive charge I am aiming for in the combination of forms.

2) ’The Blue Walking Lady and three spinning men’. Certainly proof of the other elaboarte planning process in other works. The sketch for this work kind of came form nowhere. The figure and frames are from a newspaper cutting I have had for ages and the three figures (which now fill the frames) are of the footballer Nani at various stages in an acrobatic goal celebration. The organisation of space is something I am already happy with in this work, it has a certain riguour which I think works. In terms of subject matter I am perhaps a bit uncomfortable with it. It is perhaps the most personal of my works since ‘Adonis lies…’.

3) Swimmer. An overly planned work. Six sketches were made and then a further six attempted to bring together the strangths of the first six. I gave up on these as I realised I was overthinking things and constraining the process. The picture, just in its early stages, will hopefully liberate itself from this.

 4) ’Horse between somewhere and nowhere’ A horse moving between two spaces, which shall be of formally opposing types (colour, tone, surface). Already a gorgeous jammy surface on the right which will need to be destroyed for the picture to function sucessfully. I imagine I will procrastinate for a long time before bring myself to do that. But at the moment its an empty surface aesthetic, serving no purpose.

These last brief descriptions reveal the last reason for my lack of writting. Having cast of the shackles of other thinking the sketches I have managed to engage in the actual act. I don’t feel to much of a need to analysis this in writting to any great degree. But perhaps that is what I am now doing. Whoops 

Why does the book feel warm to the touch?  it feels warm because its relative heat is warmer than that of my fingertips.  How is this possible?  How is heat possible within something that is not living?  it must have warmth within it because it feels warm to the touch.  This is just the strength of the suns rays reacting within and heating up its molecules.  How can this mean that it is warmer than I, who has the advantage of the suns rays as well as creating my own warmth?  It is due to relativity.  My fingers are a lot colder than my centre which creates the illusion that the book feels warmer.  What is illusion, does it not suggest the intervention of an outside (sentient) force, or is illusion just the wrong choice of word?  the wrong choice, quite simply.  equally, if i touch the stone by my side, it is considerably colder than my fingers, this suggests that the relativity between my centre and my extremities is not the only force acting upon the feeling of warmth from the book.  the book itself must be warmer than the stone, why, if there is no life inside the book?  well, there used to be life.  (a question that should have been asked at the start) Does the production of warmth equate to life?  no.  only mammals.  but equally it is within the interests of the life form to restrict the amount of heat loss that occurs because life does not exist without some warmth.  i think it is likely that there are residual effects of these devices available within the book[....]

this is taken from Gilles Deleuze Logic of Sensation

Bacon has always tried to eliminate the sensational, that is, the primary figuration of that which provokes a violent sensation.  This is the meaning of the formula “I wanted to paint the scream more than the horror”.  When he paints the screaming pope there is nothing that might cause horror, and the curtain in front of the pope is not only a way of isolating him, of shielding him from view, it is rather the way in which the pope himself see’s nothing, and screams before the invisible.  Thus neutralized, the horror is multiplied because it is inferred from the scream and not the reverse.

I think this is an interesting point because of its impact on narrative.  essentially Bacon opposes narrative because it represents a veil which lies inbetween the viewer and a direct sensation upon the nervous system.  I think he’s correct insofar as his works are incredibly immediate, and there appears to be no way around this issue, so the decision for the contemporary artist is whether they want to tread bacon’s path, or sacrifice some of that gutteral impact for more specified information.

At one point [david] sylvester suggests “since you talk about recording different levels of feeling in one image…. you may be expressing at one and the same time a love of the person and a hostility towards them… both a caress and an assault?” to which bacon responds, “that is too logical.  i don’t think thats the way things work. I think it goes to a deeper thing: how do i feel i can make this image more immediately real to myself?  Thats all.”

This to me represents a strength of Bacon, to know what is required for a painting and specifically for a painting.  it is a particular danger for the visual artist to fall into the trap of listening to that side of them which attempts to form understanding into words. this has become particularly prevalent through the growth in influence of post-structuralist theory, which at its conception is a linguistic crtique.

A painting works as a universe captured within the four walls of a canvas.  for a painting to have light it must also have darkness.  just as there must be dark within the universe for light to have any relevance.  however, i always struggle with this, its as if i work against myself, like i’m so terrified of the dark that i try to fill my paintings with light and colour. and all this brings is a blindness through light.   an over-exposed film.