I had the thought the other day -and its the first time this notion has seemed to have a purpose- that I am consistently most pleased with the first layer of a work.  Everything afterwards seems to only corrupt the purity of this first attack on the virgin canvas.  The notion seemed to come to me and then drift away again, but today, as I have just started another work, this feeling has stuck.  Why, why this time?  Now i’m unsure what to do.  Whilst the idea that the hard work behind painting has t sshow in its completion, no longer distracts me.  I still have the idea in my mind, that a painter has to break through the metaphysical barrier in someway, and that this requires a shifting of context within the work.  But it is perhaps foolish of me to believe that this “wall” need necessarily mean that a painting is worked then re-worked.  It is obvious now that I have still been holding onto romanticised notions of work within painting. 

Figurines of transformation.

Transformation as the central drive of Art

Religion as a drive for transformation

Religion as Art

Art as transformation

Transformation as a desire to escape the unknowable

Religion as unknowable

Art as unknowable.

Ideology

Selling a dream, a myth.  The future is a perversion of the past.

The death of an idea leaves a void, yet nothingness does not exist, so we are compelled to fill it with something.  The “something” is a corruption of the belief.  Symbols to signify the belief become empty but are acted out to show our command over something which once commanded us.  But all it ends up showing is our debt to the belief and our inability to escape from its influence.

Oedipus, look after you eyes!

Love is a belief- a faith.  The willingness to devote yourself to something which can never be proved.

Nostalgia plays a large part in myth.

This is a sketch for a painting I am currently working on. The image from which this sketch emerged was of a group of football players celebrating a goal. If my memory is accurate it was Hull City. That is of little importance though.

I knew that what interested me about the sketch was the collection of figures on the floor who seem to have formed a heap as if fallen. A collection of still standing figures seemed to present the potential to become protagonists rather than a part of the mellee (as they were, in the case of the three on the right, in the original image) Beyond this I did not really have to much idea, or much desire for any idea, as to what the picture would become or be about.

It is a paitning I am still struggling with, and I am not sure it will pull together. I think with the right additions it might suddenly find a certain harmony, but with that kind of tension which emerges when harmony is found at the last minute. The other kind of balance is one which seems to exist throughout and tends to be quite dull, due to a crucial lack of said tension.

Whilst completion is struggling to be found some form of relevance does seem to be pushing itself forward. I tihnk it is a painting about excess. A kind of post Baccanalian sense of uncontrolled debauchery. The mess of figures on the floor, the dancing cartoon grotesques, the mess of different stylistic approaches, the excessive and crude use of colour and painterly techniques. Its like some egotistical, pissed up cock jangle. 

Its quality, an abstract term, and its relevance don’t necessarily hugely concern me. In truth I tihnk it might turn out to be a crap painting. What is of interest though, is how imagery, subject, content and meaning do seem to have found their way forward without any real preconceived agenda or notion on my part. In large scale format this is one of the first times this has happened.  

On Sunday I took down a solo exhibition at ‘The Gallery; Stratford Upon Avon Leisure Centre’. Due to the short notice I did not go into the show with any specific aspirations or goals. Such lack of direction can often limit the potential of a venture, in this case it has led to some interesting and unexpected outcomes.

 The space was large enough to provide a chance to review the majority of the work i have produced over the last twelve months. It fitted, with some areas perhaps a little cramped, over one hundred paintings in.

 Displayed chornologically, for want of any solution more than any grand plan, it gave a visual indication of the shifts and, dare I say, improvements I have made. These include a progressively more varied and sophisiticated use of paint; in relative not absolute terms. I have stopped overloaded my canvas in the empty belief that weight of paint and length of labour equally painterly vitality. Instead i now have a discussion going on between areas which are left almost untouched and other areas of dense and layered paint. This is something I thought was happening and something I had consciously worked on due to advise from Andy; who correctly spotted my surfaces were appearing dead. Yet seeing this evolution gave a much needed confirmation.

Other retrospective realisations don’t necessarily need elaborating here. Seeing them was important, not the articulaion of them. Finding a written communication is not of great use at this point.

What is more useful is some musings on where i see my practise going. For seeing the work together let me realise what I want to take from the last televe months and push forwards. I hope this doesn’t end up reading like a description of the kind of work i want to produce. For more than anything i have found that i start to work best when there is a balance between the planned known and the discovered unknown. When i know too much the outcomes become contrived and literal. The show proved that my work is at its best when I reach into the dark, unable to fully articulate the why’s. Its a cliche but it rings true.

A number of my works start to find real strength when they gravitate back towards certain formal elements which have always fascinated me. The most notable of these is a interest in binary oppositions; lights/darks, gloss/matt, dense/light and saturated/unsaturated. There are, and they are failry obvious and well trodden, many philosophical pathways opened up by such oppositions. Many of these seem to even relate fairly directly to a few of the themes which I ‘think’ my work is about. Yet a discussion of these is limiting. it is not the theoretical justification which makes me want to pursue these oppositions more rigourously. It is just clear that i am drawn to them in the production and consumption of my own work. It is common sense, therefore, to perpetuate there existence.

 Another aspect of my works I noticed was that a number are too singular, too stylised if you like. its as if i find a particular avenue of a certain visual language and then pursue it to the point of pastiche. Sometimes a pastiche of others adn sometimes of self. My work seems to have more energy and purpose when it breaks free from such repetitive procedures. this happens, almost exclusively, in the smaller/sketchier works. This is clearly a result of the lose of worry and the paralyse of anlysis. When a work is smaller or less ‘important’ i am prepared to take risks, to not use exclusively the ‘best’ means at my disposal. The truth is that these best means are just the outcome of a current whim and personal fashion. There is not real qualitive assesment, just a leaning for particular forms and processes. When freeded of this self imposed restriction I am happy to sit various types of surface, various processes, various forms and ways to make on the same canvas. it is not done for the sake of variety. it more utalitarian than that. you will be sat with a sketch and just decide it needs something and whatever that thing is, or whatever is to hand, will be hanressed. Hence pink sugar paper next to translucent oxide yellow glazes. its an unconscious conflating of high and low modes of production.

 When I get onto larger works I revert to type. i rever to the current etlisit snobbery which graviitates towards certain effects which I currently postion nearer the top of the hierachy. The works become more mundane, dead and stifled in their singular language.

 Long story short and all that crap… I want my large works to have the freedom and variety of the smaller works. i want that multiplicity of formal content.

 The multiplicity reaches further than the formal aspects. i also want my subject to have more variety. Excuse the pun, but the works have started to drown in the density of pretentiously tragic and depressing themes. Constant falling and floating figures. individuals subjected to falls from the unknowing impact of protagonists. Its all a bit overblown, all a bit overdone in its attempt at tragedy. It smacks of a pathetic, privaliged, first world, western, white male desperately in search of a life which is grand and heroic not mundane in its saturation of comfort. That is exactly what it is.

 This is not to say i want to lose these factors. Despite their flaws they are themes i have arrived at and reminaed with naturally. i have not consciously overthought them or dogmatically stuck with them through some belief in importance. I have just been drawn to them. What needs considering is the tone of the subject, not the subject itself. It needs more variety and alance, something to light the overbearing weight of introspection and oppressive pretension.

 The answer, i believe, is humour. I think back automatically to two obvious examples, Ted Hughes and Shakespeare. ‘The Crow’ is just about the most cynical and depressingly dark collection of poems I have ever read. Yet it is also hilarious. There is a razor sharp and cutting wit in his Hughes’ tragedy. Shakespeare is the master of so many things, most of which I don’t know about or can’t comprehend. I don’t think this is in anyway me buying into his canonical status, he is just fucking awesome. When i watched King Lear I was amazed at the consistent ability to intertwine humour and the deepst and darkest of perosnal tragedy. Each ran alongside adn supported the other. I see no reason, have no desire and no ability to anlayse this observation or even describe its prescence. All that matters to me at this point is that it was there.

 This combination of the dark (tragedy) and the light (humour) is something I now want. I want the supposedly serious to also have the ludicrous. I want the paintings to laugh at themesleves, to break the veener and veil of pretention. I want to find a way for that humour to add to the tragedy. i don’t want to make ironic, pastiche works which knowlingly dismiss themsevles. its slightly different to that. It is the similar kind of thing I am looking for in ‘figures who want to have fallen’. I want them to be such depressingly hero seeking tragic figures that they are ludicrous, that they are funny. I then want that humour to actually be what makes them so tragic.

I want this humour to be something I have in the back of my mind but not something I try to consciously inject. Whenever i try and plan the wit it fails. I just end up thinking of to literally ludicrous additions, like a uy falling onto a bannana. I hope, and perhaps without product, that by having an intention of its addition that it will start to emerge from the process. Now that i articulate this I am aware it sounds like some vague mystical attempt at alchemey. Christ knows. Even this theorising and postulating is pretty embarresing.

I think that humour has started to emerge in a recent work. The sketch was of a group of fottballers celebrating. I was always aware that I wanted these figures to find a new painterly context whereby they become figures hree of the figures not yet in the pile showed potential to be seperate to the other, the protagonists not the victims. I made a conscious effort to make stylisitc differences in the two ‘groups.’ I did not plan the differences but knew that I would approach them seperately and let both evovle in their own direction and so have difference by result of a process not a design.

The pile of figures have moved in the firection of fleshiness. The three standing figures seem to have held onto certian linear qualities and then excentuated these to the point of arriving at caricature. The three faces seemed to have such identity that i felt a need to drawn attention to them with colour. (this sounds far shitter than i think it is). The important feature is that their faces are ludicrous, one nows looks like an insane blue version of pacman. The contrast between the fleshy mass and the cartoon like figures seem to work and seems to not be contrived. They are still united by other formal similarities and so the difference seems to not jar. I could be wrong. Crucially, however, the protagonists make me laugh. i can’t fully put my finger on it but they do. WHOOP.

 I think I had more to say, but I am boring myself so would be surpsied if anyone else has even got this far. If so, congratultions for bearing the above.