yea, first of all, just some thoughts on what you’ve had to say on flesh.  i feel like i’ve made some strides forward in this field recently so i’m gonna give my 2 pennies worth. 

you know what i think about you using acrylic, it’s all well and good but i still think you should use oil for the final layers of the work particularly when painting flesh.  i think that you have a desire to create a style of painting that reaches back into the rennaissance past whilst speaking of the present, but i think you can only get the subtlety that perhaps you desire but which you’re denying yourself, through oils.  for example, how you stated that you lay down the tones then glaze over the colour,  i tried this for ages, because of the teaching from uni, but i think that its better if you lay down the tone, then still using solid paint, painting up the colour but rubbing back where needed, back to the white.  this gives the effect of the light, just gently shimmering through the the skin.  you can experiment with how you lay down the white as well, sometimes rough sometimes smooth, this then creates different effects when you rub through to it, but you need to use oil to do this, because the transition from opaque to transparent is a lot smoother and with the slower drying time it allows you to do this.  then the glazes go on top of this to make necessary adjustments to the pitch.  As for the colours i am using now, i found out that titian used rose mixed with white, which is surprising because it makes a really sugary sweet pink, but if you use this as the high pitch it sits forward really nicely against the more smokey alizarin and yellow ochre/naples yellow deep.  you said you’re going to use bluer hue for the shadow, but try using alizarin for the deepest parts because i’ve found that a little blue goes a long way, just captured on the edges of depressions has a great impact. for cooling i tend to use cobalt or cerulean, but as a glaze terre verte works particularly well over alizarin, and i quite often use this for subtle effects just after the tonal stage, before colours are applied.  As a glaze i also find burnt umber quite successful, i’d use this as the 1st glazing stage, settling in the pits and crevasses, then the yellows as the final stage if you feel it needs them.

I’ve pondered whether to write this, because as you know its important to allow somebody to find their own way rather than pushing them onto yours, but i feel somethings may be of use,  dunno how much, you probably want a completely different look to what i’m describing.

 As for your new work, i’m not sure about success of the 2 they want to have fallen works, the cutting up into 2 parts, one heavily worked the other left almost alone worked really well in the horse image but seems a little contrived here. 

but on that daler boy something is working, the clean drawing of the diver sits nicely against the rest, it appears almost like the temptation for intellectualised, logical thought is fighting against nature, this is something that could work for you, and through knowing you, is very much a part of your personality.  Perhaps you should look in depth at R. B Kitaj, as this is something i also find in him.  His narratives are almost absurdly complex yet they are lightened by his charming questioning style.

But i’ve got to say, i still have real issues with this thick brown/orange glaze you seem to like so much.  i don’t know whether this is how it comes, or whether you add colour, perhaps trans yellow oxide to it but i don’t like it, i think it looks dirty and not necessarily contemporary.  this i’m sure is down to the acrylic again, perhaps alongside using too much pigment as trans yellow has incredibly strong tinting powers.  acrylic seems to drag everything into a flatness when what you are actually wanting is something that is crystaline and retains its appearence of fluidity.  I also think it shouldn’t be used straight on the primed canvas or tones but that there should be solid colour painting underneath.  I remember someone at uni saying, the sign of a good painter is someone who can paint  wet in wet, and this is something i think that would improve you loads.  a lot of your work appears to be using the watercolour techniques of working light to dark, but sometimes it would be good for you to go to the rembrandtian, work from the brown into the light (i’m thinking of the bottom section of diver here).  To give the bodies of objects a solidity, which is something that you are lacking.  even when you look at Doig’s ghostly figures, they seem to have some impact on the world around them.

Your sketches are some of the strongest things you’re doing at the minute, but there’s not too much i can say about them, they do exactly what they say on the tin.

One other thing which i think could push you on is to pay more attentiion the accuracy of your observations, to make a space more real, without giving too much depth if you don’t want, is to consider more closely the lines between objects, how objects tie together on the tapestry of the image, whether there is lightness inbetween or dark.  also, when considering the tone, to consider the tonal relationship of the whole rather than each bit as separate.

Hope some of these points are of some use, ive not really spoken about what you’re painting but how you’re painting.  you look like you are working through the issues of what you’re painting yourself so i figured you don’t need too much comment there.

I don’t have much to say about ‘True Story’. This is not becasue it is not a strong image, but becasue I feel you were fairly comprehensive in your assesment during its production in an earlier blog. Its power does seems to be in the small but significant shift made between the original photographic image the the painting.

Technically I think it is one of your best pictures. It seems to have both the flatness of such posters and the fleshy depth of portrait painting. It has an uneasy tension between a real character and an imagined figure of nostalgia.

The ’sunset’ tryptych seems to develop a tendency in your work for awkward imagery. There is a snese of unease in the drawing which seems considered in relation to the setting and the dynamics of the figures. I like the idea of this continual struggle an attempt to pull down this figure who appears effortless unmovable. Thie ring is clearly baconesque as is the type of struggle. Yet I don’t think you move into the relams of pastiche. This seems like a more pathetic attempt at heroism rather than Bacon’s agenda of personal tragedy and suffering.

 Fish seems quite Weischer like. Perhaps it is the use of space or maybe the colour range. Either way, I tihnk it isw a really strong painting but I don’t necessarily have much to say about it.

‘Clap your hands superman’ is interesting. Its a considered deviation from the other ‘crucifixiion’ sketch which it directly relates to. It seems like you are consciously looking to insert the absurd into this one. Perhaps this works or perhaps it is the product of a fear of the proximity the image has with Chirstian motifs and you being uncomfortable in dealing with this overly trodden path. I think the solution perhaps lies somewhere between the two and will emerge from an exceptance of your attraction to the particular symbol and its resonance and to just work with it with an awarness but blaise lack of care.

‘I the flight of Icarus plight’ is clearly a point where our works starts to sit on similar subject matter. I think this could provide fascinating breeding ground, a constant conversation perhaps. Iconographically it works so well. The scrambling Icarus’ failed attempt offset and highlighted by the succesful flight of the hot air ballon. The covering of the ballon, with the cartoon egg man adds a good dash of ludicrous humour. I think this particular subject matter requires this addition of a light touch.  

The dog walking man seems to be a recurring motif of yours and one which I have particular interest in. It is obvisouly, to me at lerast from our discussions, derived from the nature of the chance glance in photography. I think you could experiment even further with where the figure is cut off, perhaps conscioulsy half cut by the frame, as if leaving perhaps (and also the kind of framing more naturally associated with photography). What I find interesting is that such a cut of in a photograph is just the result of the flux of life and the unpredictability of the ditritus when you frame a general scene. But when we add this into a painting it takes on an importance, it becomes significant in narrative terms, a protagonist leaving the stage.

I have been doing a few sketches of men walking dogs as, I think, a direct result of your dog and boy painting a while ago. It is interesting, therefore, to see a similar motif return to your work after you discussed it in some depth in that found photograph a while ago. With your permission it may well be a motif i continue to play with. I am in this instance giving you the god like role in the allowance of dog walking men.

The beach seems to be an increasingly popular sight for your figures to find themselves. It is obviously a familar scene in painting terms and is particuarly relevant for british painters. Have you seen Courbet’s beach scenes? Look them up, they are truly sublime and not really what you expect from him. Have you visited the beach rescently? If not then do you think it might help?

In terms of meaning the beach is, as you are aware, clearly a site of cahnge, a place on the edge of one land and leading out to a seemingly limitless void of sea. It resonates with enough potential to build up significant conversations with the figures with which you populate it. It obviously provides you with horizotnal forms of structuring but then takes away vertical reference points. This is an obvious point but perhaps one worth thinking about. Do you play on this horizontality or do you need to more consciously work on intriducing vertical reference points? Do you consider the placing in terms of the x or y coordinates primarily? You might not consciously prioritise either but its worth having a think about.

I particuarly like the colour ranage in this picture. That blue just seems to glow. The scrambling figure is good. I have just finihsed two paintigns with scrambling figures and a load of drawigns. i am plannign more. I think I am going to continue working from phtogoraphic images.

This painting is one of your best yet, I think. One criticism would be that from the jpeg thje application of paint seems fairly similar all over; but thats very hard to judge from a digital image.

It has certainly given me a fair bit to think about with my own work becasue I feel it relates quite directly in many ways.

Have just discovered a really good skin hue. Hansa Yellow medium, plus tit white, plus alizarin crimson. Its quite a Freudian skin hue. I think it is maybe too singuarly warm, so obvioulsy would need a bluer range for the shadows.

I am interested to see how it might work when applied in the system I normally go about painting flesh. Normally I build up tone first, laying done the white and the darks. I then glaze over to get the colouring. I do this in order to create a depth of surface which allows light through and hopefully creates both an inner glow and a sense of the flesh falling apart. I will try the above combination, but laying the white down first then glazing over in the alizarin crimson and hansa yellow. A glazed dash of transparent yellow iron oxide/interference gold might just give it the extra kick. I think I will need to push the shadows towards the blue end of the colour I normally mix up (Ultramarine blue and burnt umber, sometimes wqith a dash of alizarin) If I remove the alizarin and up the ratio of ultramarine, maybe even add a dash of colbalt, then it might work. We shall see.

On a side note I have just got the ‘Tom Daley’ diving painting to start working. The crowd were causing me a headache. I want them to be a wall of spectators but had pushed that to the point where the individiual figures had been lost, drowning in a deep glaze of dark blue brown. I have pulled them back with a composition of various vibrant pastels. Yellows/pinks/greens/oranges have been applied to the bodies at loosely balanced points across the surface. I think it has start to get that sense of rhythm and melody which some of my pictures have been lacking. I am also pleased with the way the paint has been applied. It has enough vigour to evoke the crowd without describing them. For the ultimate example of this look to Manet’s crowd in one of his bullfighting paintings. They have a prot pollockesque energy in the handling of paint. He was a bit good that Manet bloke.

The photographer is far more democratic in his approach than the painter. By its nature his practise allows him to point and click with less consideration over the minutie of his creation. He considers tone, composition, scale and all the other equivalent formal elements that a painter concerns himself with. The difference is that his is a selective process, not an onnipotent one. Whilst he frames he chosen material other detritus are free to present themselves in any way that the occasion and time and space allow. The painter, however, tends to select every element of his imagery.

This results in passages of genuine naturalness in a photograph. We may frame a beach scene to capture the sunset and the image of two children playing bat and ball. In the left hand corner, however, we may accidentally have happened upon the edge of a man walking a dog half way through leaving the scene.

 Its the kind of dramatic positioning which has begun to filter into painterly image making through the influence of photography. These chance moments can now be lifted, directly or indirectly, from photographic discovery to painterly construction.

 It seems, Andy, that your continued fascination with the wandering dogs and man walking dogs is a direct result of such chance glances. I remember you chowed me a while ago a photograph you found that had someone walking a dog half cropped at its edge. i commented at the time how its the kind of framing a painter would never choose; not without the infleucne of phtogoraphy.

This seems to put painting, in this instance, in a subordinate role to photography in some visual hierachy. The reality is that in its borrowing painting transforms that moment.

The cut of figure almost dissovles into nothingness in a phtograph. The viewer is aware that it is an unconsider extra, an accident of the process. Their deconstruction of the pictorial dynamics remains attached to the central figures of the image.

The viewer of the painting cannot so easily show such selective vision. The moment we look at a painitng we are aware, or believe, that we are looking at something whose every motif has been selected. The cut of man walking the dog, therefore, can no longer be dismissed. Instead he must take on some anrrative, dramatic or visual role. He becomes an attendant figure, a supported, a protagonist perhaps. A figure leave the stage and opening up a potential dialogue with the rest of the image. He points to both a world outside of the frame and complkicates the selected world within.

When we conflate the visual referents of the photographic and painted worlds we always find that the collaberation of the two creates a shifted visual code which is perhaps not previously present in either.

History simplifies. It reduces the past down to clearly distinguishable groups which are derived from but almost totally divorced from reality. In terms of painting it reduces the past into patterns, tendencies and styles. In truth paintings past  nothing like as linear in progression or clear in categorisation as we would like to think.

That said, there is no doubt that we now live in a time where the painterly (and wider)landscape is more diverse, fragmented and confused than ever. The lack of unifying concepts, clear agendas or singular centres has made sure of that.

Painting is most certainly alive, fererently so. But amoungst the chaos of its current existence what unites it. more importantly, for me, what ermege as common grounds from which a young practitioner can find some kind of pathway? 

 What is clear is that any pathway that mereges is tailor made ofr each practiioner. The potential streams of influence are so vast that we can hand pick the aspects which we choose to relate to, be informed by and take influence from.

 Amoungst contemporary uniqueness there are tendenceis which are continuous within paintings histories. As shifting permanents it is perpahs important to locate these first.

Style. Style has always been a central fascet of the painters fascination. The formal minutiae of the practise are inherantly important to any person who picks up a fl uid liqud intending to place it across a flat surface to create a ‘painting’. Style transcends subject matter, in that it concerns are regardlessof the what and why of our approach. This is not to say it is not directly related to this, just that it also has a certain autonomy. 

Every paintiner is to some extent look to continue, develop and find an appropriate ’style’. I use the word loosley. I don’t mean stlye in tersm of stylised. I just mean the consideration of space, the application of the medium, the use of colour, the formation of line and the combination of these parts to create a whole. We are always looking to consider these to find something of our time, of ourself, different to the past and which stretches the language of painting to artiuclate a variation of past messages. The particular details of this observation are not too important at this moment in time.

Beyond such a general trend there are more specific tendencies which seem to underpin much contemporary practise.

Multiplicity. It becomes very hard to locate yourself when there are so many different avenus being taken by painters. Many still continue directly from the 20th Century obsession with abstraction. From process painting, pure abstraction and continuations of expressionism. Others have full immersed themselves in the rebirth of image making, but this is then broken done into infinate subcategories. A list of stylistic labels would do us no favours as they general blind rather than describe. For me this very multiplicity of approachs is not a denial of a tendency but is a tendency in itself.

The return of the image after its death. The image seems to have been attacked and killed off from enough angles to make its return complicated. If the image, due to its over exposire, is dead and if iconography is now empty of meaning; then what use does it have in this new pictorial painterly landscape? A point Andy made the other day seems to ring true. That we have emptied images of meaning and thus using them seems to become about this emptienss is many ways. I am a little confused as to exactly what I mean here, I shall have to give it some thought.

Bacon is interested in the figure beyond figuration. It is a kind of form which acts directly on our nervous system. The sensation of the flesh, undistracted by thought.

It is the figure removed from the confines of specific narrative. No longer needed extensive labouring over or confined to more praggmatic end points. It has found a certain autonomy.  Itis something more direct, lacking the waffled monolgued. Its the recording of the fact, a true realism, and avoidance of the empty motif.

In this chapter movement is also touched upon. The link between Bacon and Muybridge is mentioned. The later is cited has provided a fertile base for Bacon to draw from in revelling new ‘decompositions’ of movement.

Rhythm is mentioned in regards to Bacon and movement. Figural dynamcis are certainly the most improtant aspect of Bacon’s figures. The squirm, the dissovle, they melt, they fall, the implode, they vomit themsleves out and get pulled in by some inner gravity, they are wiped over and split open. These acrobats are often scarred with blurtred scrubbings, ambiguous passagesof paint which denote a particular movement through space. They also convey more illustrative positionings of limbs, moments paused, figures held in a particular pose and denoting a movement stilled between A and B. It seems like a direct link back to Bacon’s fascination with photography, the slow vs fast shutter speed approach to capturing movement. In amoungst the choas, the lines, the paint and the space, Bacon seems to harness both. He does it without ignoring the principles of his own medium, but instead as a mode in which to follow deconstruct adn understand it. It becomes a dialogue adn battle between painterly organic marks and linear design. I think colour also plays a huge part.

muybridge- ‘the decomposition of movement into seperate parts’ intense and violent movements. the impact of invisable forces.

rhythm-s 

“For both Bacon and Kafka the spinal colum is nothing but a sword beneath the skin, slipped into the body of an innocent sleeper by an executioner” 

Deleuze describes the seperation in Bacon’s figures of bone and flesh. The subbordinate nature of the skeletal structure and flesh coating in reality and the drawn linear structure and painterly covering in art is challenged.

Bacon’s figures are not boneless, but the bones seem to become malleable and to lose total control ove rthe figural exterior. The flesh becomes primary and the hierachy is inverted. Is the product of an individual who sees both the spiritual improtance of flesh and who favours the fluid nature of paint over the rigid contorl of line.

The relaitonship is no longer one of a cage in which the flesh is controleded and trapped but a stage upon which the flesh can perform. Deleuze describes these ‘acrobatics’ perfectly.

 Some of the most pertinant examples of Bacon’s approach are seen in his dealing with heads. He ‘dismantles’ the face in order to rediscover the head. The rubbing and brushing provide visual interuptions, creating ambiuguous areas of ‘indiscernability’. The face is no longer a portrait of an individual but a vessel to describe something more universal about man in general. The figure always seem to keep some attachment to the specific of the sitters identity, to ensure empathy and pity. Yet they are shifted far enough beyond to become a metaphor of makind in general. Bacon manages to combine the emotive power of dealing with specific individuals and sesnations with the broad impact of a universal message. This is no emotionally detached intellectual allegory. It is far more direct, piercing through us and channeling into our nervous system.

Particular feature of the face take on importance for Bacon. There are what Deleuze calls ‘eyes without sockets’ which he connects back to Rembrandt. This structural loosness creates a floating hole of depth and uncertainty.  

Most distrubing, but accurate, is his description of the scream in Bacon. He talks about the mouth as a vessel through whihc the entire body, the mass of flesh, can pass. The lack of an audible scream is replaced by a visceral ingestion and excreation of self as flesh. There is a gravitational pull of the form through this hole, as if it is the central force through which the action and emotion takes place.

the mouth and its importance- no longer an organ, a hole through which the entire body escapes, sense of pressure and itnensity. and which the flesh descends.the pity of the scream, not audible, but visceral, a scream as a physcial ingestion and vomit at the same time.