Chew The Grits

A death clutch trembles,

Over the city that once was.

Once was what?

Once was not.

Or ever could have been

The thing you said it was….

Left in a broken dream,

I beat my wings and fan the flame.

You lick the ashes,

Chew the grits.

As a herald stamps his message, in time,

With the cat calls

Of bulging construction workers,

Onto the broken breastplate

That offers no protection,

No future.

No Hope.

No sanitation.

I want to build a house

Walls made of sheets of rain dancing on a car windscreen

Rooms like a book

A Comfy chair to half eat biscuits in and mourn the lose of others to a mug of tea

Walls decorated with memories

Floorboards a symphony of autumn leaves and winter morning frost crackling under feet

A carpet of spring dew

Bookshelves with the spirit of elves whispering stories whilst our

Eyes go on holiday in pictures on the wall

A sofa so soft

And a silence in place of the violence of sound

An Absence of Noise

The absence of noise is different from silence.  It is something that is particular to visual material, it is present in painting and in the silent films of the early 20th century.  Perhaps the most suitable example in moving image is the Eisenstein film which famously influenced Francis Bacon, The Battleship Potemkin, in which occurred the scream, significant in many of Bacon’s images.  The absence of noise is a powerful apparatus for purely visual imagery because when skillfully managed, it creates an imbalance that adds to the impact of a work.  Harmony is a strange word to use in the description of a painting and it is often misrepresented.  The greatest of compositions find their harmony in a series of carefully manipulated inbalances, creating tension as the eye (or, significantly, the eyes mind) is unable to rest and an energy is realised.  This imbalance does not only have to be developed through the direction of shapes and lines and the positioning of colours, it can also be found in the understanding of how an image can manipulate the psychology of a viewer.

Bacon was always a painter of psychological states, the scream is one example of how he accessed the mind of the post-war nation.  Its power lies in the expectancy of a noise to follow, which never does.  We see the scream and we tense up in the wait of some horrible primal yelp, when this doesn’t arrive an imbalance is provoked that is never resolved and so the eye’s mind attempts  to fill the space by taking closer account of this particular muscle spasm, by scanning the flesh/paint, the horror of the paint matter and the morbid fascination with the materiality of the flesh are both revealed.  It is almost like the viewer is put in place of the surgeon-painter, objectively prodding and peeling the matter, but we are not surgeons and the process is not objective for us, we see the horror of the moment in the result of the reaction (the scream). 

Jan Vermeers ouevre is in stark contrast to the volume of Bacons, however, the absence of noise plays a similarly important role.  Before we even take into account the role sound plays in his work, it is clear Vermeer was a master of light and the art of considered composition.  However, it is the role of sound (or lack of) which is where we find he rises above his contemporaries.  If I use one of his greatest works, The Milkmaid, as an example to best illustrate my point.  It has great power within the silence of the act and revels in the considered observation of watching a woman concentrating intently on pouring milk into a bowl.  Its success comes from drawing the viewer into the act, by painting the milkmaid within the isolation of her surroundings, the viewer is made aware of how silent the room must be, and by becoming aware of the silence in the image we notice the absence of the only sound that should be present, which is the sound of the milk pouring into the bowl.  This is how the necessary inbalance is created.  The only word one can use to describe the painting is that it is a meditation on a single act and everything within the painters arsenal is used to describe the act, this, added to the fact that the highlights on the pouring liquid seem to dance with the musicality of the sound, make the abscence of noise all the more pertinent.

The Top image is one of three A1 drawings which make a tryptch. The Three paintings are an unfinished tryptch. I am also working on three small paintings, three 30″x40″ paintings and have compledted 80 drawigns/mono prints around this same sereis of imagery.

Something obviously grabbed my attention long enough to warrant me to carry on.

Working on the multiples gave me a chance to create a cinematic shift around the squirming figure. It also enables me to cosnider various ways to treat the same scrambling form. Working from different photographs (all the result of a staged performance) I can attempt to pull on the different shuitter speeds, areas of indiscernability vs areas of linear clarity.

The beds seem to become stages in these works, as if this is some theatrical performance. The combination of the private domain of a bedroom and the overt theatricality of the performance creates a certain tense relationship.

The figures are supposed to be melodramatic, pathetically egotistical in their outpouring of emotion. The energy of thie mourning is meant to be eroticised, as if in some desperate call to the presummed other who is absent.

Colour wise I think there is too much going on. I think the constant saturation leads to a muting of the intended intensity. I will push the tonal range of the background further and perhaps unify the form of the figures by adding a semi translucent layer of Titanium white.

I like the idea of having a tonal range with the depth and extremity of baroque artists, that kind of Cathlic intensity and seriousness; but then splashes of acid colour to puncture this. An uncomfortable balance between horrow, seriousness, wit and the erotic is perhaps what i am searching for. On a more general level I think they are about desire, abotu an empty desire which searches for the rise and fall, which searches for the other but in the abscence of it all is left to stage excessive, acrobatic emotional outpourings.

I have started to build up a sereis of character types. My painting’s are increasingly moving towards multi figured narratives. I still think the single male figure will continue to be the main focus on my work. The shift, theatrically speaking, will be from a monologue to a central character with a supporting cast.

I want to approach the build up of this cast with as an openness. The first batch of drawings have been from images borrowed and sources from newspapers. Often they are of a figure (or two0 looking outwards) It shifs back towards the notion of the returned gaze and the protagonist. Ideally I would like to catch something of Manet’s single figures, that reverie and detachment, that introspective melancholy. It is the denial of the communication offered that seems to be the striking feature of his figures.

These two lads above disturb ne slightly. Those plastic smiles, smug grins pulled across mask likfe faces. I like the thought that perhaps they are saying, ‘We know something you don’t know’.

What is a hermit?

In the Middle Ages, someone who believed that living in a monastary or nunnery was not bringing them close enough to God may have chosen to live alone, often in wild or deserted places.  They spent their time thinking about Gods ways in the hope that it would bring them wisdom and allow them to better serve God.

Some would live near a ford or marshy swamp to act as a guide to travellers.

Sometimes a nun  would have herself shut away in a tiny cell next to the church, with only a tiny window looking into the church, a nun who did this would be called an anchoress.  A famous anchoress from the 14th century was Mother Julian of Norwich, she saw a series of 16 visions realting to Christ.

What is the difference between a vision and a hallucination? 

The Desert Fathers

Antony is known as the first christian hermit, he was made famous by the biography of St Athanasius of Alexandria.  He became the model for ascetic training and resistance to temptation.

However some accounts, particularly that of St Jerome stated that St Paul was the first hermit.  He fled from persecution when a teenager and found a great cave in the Egyptian desert, with plenty of water and palm trees, where he lived for the rest of his days, until he died at the age of 113years!

Although this story is questionable in its truth, it does seem to represent one of the defining qualities which is at the heart of why there is a continued interest in the people who choose to live there lives in solitude.  The ability to surround a life which is impossible to understand in myth. To exaggerate the truth is a persistent attraction for us, and a hermits life is so mysterious, it offers ample opportunity to do this.

The Hermit of Tarot cards

In tarot the hermit is a sage, not simply seeking truth and justice in solitude but bringing them to others.  He stands at the edge of a precipice, like the Fool, but knows when to stop.  He is not, like the Fool, on a quest for adventure.  He seeks to bring the light of enlightenment to others.

Info was sourced from www.hermitary.com

It seems to me that the limiting down of preoccupations is a form of dieting, and dieting to be a form of purification that allows one to focus their concentration onto matters that are found, in the time of solitude and reflection, to be matters of true significance.

It is perhaps a tenuous link but is this the reason why slim is seen to be attractive in modern society?  Slim suggests abstinence and abstinence suggests mental fortitude and purity.

Abstinence is living off nothing other than yourself, to be self-sustained, at its most extreme it is Christ taking bread and wine from his own body.

This is the ideal we have been bombarded with in the western world.

Splendid Isolation

It is a suggestion, in itself, of perhaps a greater truth. The existential realisation of the impossibility of understanding anything or anyone outside of your own sphere of experience.  Of how we are isolated sacks of flesh and blood and memories, and we only ever have this to feed off when trying to interpret or understand anything outside of ourselves.

Maybe the suggestion is that by understanding this premise we can find wisdom.

The Allotment

On a slight deviance, the allotment is gowing in strength again.  I don’t think this is solely because of a reaction to the economic downturn, but in fact also as a reeaction to the corrosion of the publics trust in politics.  We are cloaked in a climate of fear, largely the governments doing, so people are retreating metaphorically and literally into their own back yards.  To find sustainability at close quarters, relying less on institutions that have such a grip on the control of the country that even if we were to succeed in changing  the people in office, the end result would be pretty much the same.  This secret and seruptitious erosion of freewill has caused a zeitgeist of mistrust and no hope that has resulted in an attempt to gain some more control over our individual lives.  The increase in daytime tv programmes that include gardening and agriculture as part of their remit is a response to this shift, as is Jamie Olivers (the UK chef) most recent cookery book about growing your own.

Jeff Walls photography often makes deliberate and open references to past imagery. Often the imagery is from the Canon of Western history painting. This is the case here, with the nod being towards Delacroix’s ‘The Death of Sardanapalus’.

Wall does not borrow the specfics of the subject matter. Instead he takes something at its core, and then also pulls on the formal advances of the images.

Delacroix’s sub ject is of a meglomanic king, determined to outlive all his possesions. Aware of his impending death he orders all his possesions, horses and wives included, to be destroyed. The manic and uncontrolled violence is told through the deep reds which pervade the whole image, the violence and pace of the brushwork and the web of curving lines which mount up the picture plane. The whole image seems to have been tiled up, as if collapsing and pouring down across the surface.

Wall tells a parallel story but set in a contemporary, real and domestic setting.  It seems to be a story of domestic tensions having exploded in a fit of rage. We are left with the aftermath, once the cast (presumably of two) have left the stage. It is like the scene of a crime.

The red stays, filling the image with that sense of violent passion and lose of control. There is a strnage balance between chaos and stillness. The nature of photography and the abscence of any action or figures gives a sesne of increadible stillness. yet the chaotic spread of colour and objects creates a pattern of energy, as if remembering the recent past.

Wall sits comfortably and intellignetly on the boundary of painting and photography. He is a photographer in that he takes photographs, recording real visions. Yet he fits closely to a tradition of image making more traditiaonlly assocaited with painting. For the vision is constructed, it is composed, it is a synthetic ordering of parts. In this sense it has the theatricality and artificiality of painting.