Everything divides into opposites

It all decomposes into mapable coordinates

Composed artificially for need of idealism

These constructs are ascribed to our particular psyche

The imprint of a repetitive history

Never intrinsic but forcing its way beneath the skin

The vertical is male Read the rest of this entry »

The hero is dead

The hero is the figure of idealism

The tragic hero is the romantics hero and ICarus its king

The fall was the tragic hero’s motif

Tragedy is about inevitability

The fall is the inevitable conclusion of the rise

The desire to fall comes from the unfulfilled desire to rise

Tragic heroism is measured in the total distance travelled

Tragic heroism always ends where it started

Tragic heroism befitsliterautre

it has a linear narrative

upwards and then downwards through space and time

All we have left is the desire for the hero

The desire for heroism has no narrative

The desire for heroism is static

It desire movement through space and time

It desires the rise that necessitates the fall

It remains attached to the base level

Twitching and squirming at best

The hero is dead

Tragedy is dead

only unfulfilled desire is left

An image of group exercise is a powerful one.  It unsettles.  Why is this?

Perhaps it reveals something about ourselves that we don’t necessarily want to accept, and when we look upon this fact from the outside it appears stupid to us.

Is there a clue within this image as to how we can best utilize painting as an artform?  The same effect would not be achieved through writing because writing forces us to see through anothers eyes.  It is the homeland of opinion.  Painting, whilst not being as democratic as photography, is certainly more democratic than writing.  Because it doesn’t have this voice dictating opinion onto us, painting is perfectly placed to make this kind of comment.  Essentially painting has a limited area in which it can function to its fullest potential, but it is best when it is like a mirror held up to humankind.  Photography in turn cannot have this ability because at heart the photographers eye is a naive eye.  A painting gains power through its deliberateness in the choices made.

This is a terrible post, i’ve just read it back.

But in there is something that almost makes sense, so i’ll leave it.  What the hell.

The sword swung down and embedded itself neatly into my thigh.  I did not scream for there was no pain, just the shock of the body against the cold steel, which caused the flesh to politely disect and part, revealing the way for a cute ribbon of the deepest red to unfurl and flow down my leg.  Rather than recoil, my purpose remained undimmed, I grabbed the hand that gripped the sword, so to keep the blade firmly inside me,  I wanted to embrace the sensation, to make it real, like some jilted lover who desparately clings to their adultrous other, holding them so close that they suffocate under the weight of their own infidelity.  Mad dog.  I breathed through bubbles of spit and searched the face of my enemy.  He was unremarkable except for the insanity of the moment that was caught within his eyes,  perhaps i was only seeing a reflection of myself, like you do when you stare intently enough into the eyes of another.  With my one free hand I pulled him close and sank my teeth deep into his throat, snorting as I did, his blood filled my mouth and poured forth from my nose.  Wheezing through his new hole, he lay catapleptic on the floor, waiting for the pitying pecks of the crows that circled above.  Only animals can be heroes, only animals can exist with cold hard fact.

Joseph Conrads Narcissus used in a comment on Francis Bacons figures from Deleuze

That infamous nigger rushed at the hole, put his lip to it, and whispered “Help” in an almost extinct voice; he pressed his head to it, trying madly to get out through that opening one inch wide and three inches long.  In our disturbed state we were absolutely paralyzed by his incredible action.  It seemed imossible to drive him away.”

Bacon’s scream, is the operation through which the entire body attempts to escape through the mouth.  always bacons figures are attempting this action, not just through the mouth, but by vomiting, excreting, sex. the fact that its an impossible action, to break free, or rather through, yourself, makes it intensely disturbing.

william burroughs was also successful in evoking this phenomenon.

Johnnys body begins to contract, pulling up toward his chin. Each time the contraction is longer. “Wheeeeee!” the boy yell, every muscle tense, his whole body strain to empty through his cock.

i just think these examples are truly fantastic in encapsulating that way we seem to work against ourselves. the conscious and subconscious are not insinc, even if they are speaking of actions that are more specific and intentional.

gordon comstock is thinking about his only published book of poems.

He thought with loathing of that sneaky little foolscap octavo.  those forty or fifty drab, dead little poems, each like a little abortion in its labelled jar.

i just think this little piece of hate filled writing is simply fantastic.  i wish i could speak with as much eloquence in my paintings about the experience of failure as he does in his prose.  the language is so visceral (i should mention that the rest of the book so far is equally as good, i just couldn’t be arsed writing more out) and unapologetic.  Its incredibly brave.

on an upshot from my uneloquent failures, i’ve had a certain amount of success with the glazing of a little work called downhill.  I glazed the majority of the surface with a delicate rose and then the slope with aureolin.  the slope was white with a tiny amount of viridian and once glazed it truly took off against the warm and cool reds of the rest of the pic.  so much so that i initially wiped off the aureolin in panic at its intensity.  until after some deliberation i reapplied an even more gentle glaze of aureolin, and now i look at it, i’m incredibly happy with the result.

The sun has moved now inexorably along its path and can be seen glowing through my window,  if you care to look.  Its blinding.  I think I may have to move now, or soon, just so i can again see something, anything.

Mary was writing on a pad, on a desk.  Her scrawl was mesmerizing, the type of writing they only had in the old days.  you don’t get that type of writing anymore, people just don’t take the time to practice.

The square couldn’t contemplate the possibility of being a cube, transfixed as it were by the confines of its own existence.  The whale just had time enough to contemplate the beauty of its own existence, before it ceased to be a whale.  And a mayfly struggles to understand the concept of existence when placed inside the infinitly vast yet confined experiences of a rock.

I struggle to understand how she can breathe in that thing, she still looks elegant though, even if her stomach is a tit and her kidneys are her arse.  Plaintive though, melancholy, but oh so beautiful.  I bet my hands could reach all the way round there and touch fingertips.  And my hands aren’t even that big, in fact they’re really small.  I have tiny hands.

It takes ages to paint.

The sun has gone again now.  It keeps doing that, and then coming back again.  I do miss it when its not there, or here.  It doesn’t seem to last long when its here.  need to remember to enjoy it while it lasts.  even if it does hurt.  The iron man says the same. Ted says that pain is cathartic. the iron man burnt his bottom, so i wonder if he’d still say the same.  he probably would, it all makes sense that way.

Sir (apologies in advanced for a post full of mistakes and rushed in content. I have just meant to reply for a few days now and have not had time. So I thought a fast and chaotic and poorly written response would be better than nothing at all. If you finish reading this blog and feel three minutes of your life have been gobbled up by utter junk, then I apologise… next time I shall realise that silence is better than noise…. too much coffee

In answer to your questions. Firstly, yes that picture is the Acteon one I referred to.

In terms of the humour. Its strange. Recently I have been thinking a lot about how I want the tragedy and drama and melancholy in my works to be underpinned by a humourous touch. I think it provides a more humane, rounded and less suffocating narrative. We only need to look to Ovid and Shakespeare to realise how well the two relate.

So I have been searching for ways to incorporate thjese kinds of touches, but I dont know if I was aware of it when I constructed this particular sketch. Although as I made it the humour did seem to emerge. I suppose this is a positive way to work, less forced… about decisions made during the process… not totally premeditated and therefore literal.

In terms of space I was thinking of two things. Firstly I liked the notion of having tiny figures at the bottom of a vertical painting. i felt like it would give then sxcene an epic and sublime feel.

Within this vertical, though, the figures play across a thin horiztonal strip. So hopefully that can generate the narrative movement from left to right; his flight, his past and future. Those who enter stage and those who leave.

I can’t want to start it and let loose on the upper half. I am still in search of an empty space as sublime, as moving as that in David’s ‘Death of Marat’. For me that is this one of the high points in a spiritual, poetic use of space in figure painting (from the works i know of course). It beats Freidrich (sp) hands down and looks forward to Rothko. I am keen to move back towards this kind of point, yet with the reinsertion of figures, whereby a dialgue is created between the empty space adn the figure… between something and nothing, between figuration and abstraction. And on and on… waffling now.

Loved the post of the figure in contemporary painting. i am stealing that as part of my lecture in a few week on representation in images today. I want to look at the difference between narrative adn allegory, between specific characters adn more generalised figures. I think this is something particularly relevant to figurative artists today… sitting on that boundary between specifics adn metaphysics seems to be what this postmodern malarky is all about.

To detach ourselves from that notion, however, it is interesting to go back to the ‘masters’ and realise how there has always been a play between specific narratives and more generalised philsophical embodiments. It is just perhaps the boundaries are less clear than ever now.

“When I was fifteen, I wanted, in thoughts, words and works, to murder my father with my Hitler Youth dagger. (From generation to generation the intention remains the same only the weapon changes.)
When I was sixteen I loved an unfinished girl- to be filled in as desired- from a distance; ever since, I have been able to wish and imagine until she knocks, comes in, and starts a fight.
When I was seventeen - held together only by my sword belt - I learned under my steel helmet to know fear, later (by way of compensation) hunger, and soon thereafter the vast wild animal corral known as freedom.
From eighteen on, I tried to survey that corral and discovered how intricately subdivided it is and how seldom reason and intellect are neighbours: the greater the intelligence, the more devastatingly its stupidity can run wild. It is seldom the fools, and often the shrewd and knowing, who try to make the worl pay for their defeats.
After that, I spent quite a long time living very little but only writing; I was a storehouse for dispersed fragments, also for duly entered losses.”

I often find that so much of Grass’ novels are as close to painting as prose can get. His writing exists in a world that doesn’t follow traditional norms, at once floating from the auto-biographical to the fantastical, the chronology works not along some linear pathway, organised and rigid, but is tied to the unfiltered influence of memory, and as such you’re never quite sure what is the facts of his life, what is made up characterisation and what simply floats away from any semblance of reality and off into surreal anecdote. Yet still, within this mesh of complex contexts and conceptual constructions you will find passages like the one previously shown here, that are exquisitly delicate, sensitive portrayals of humanity. It seems that however intricate the writing appears to be it still relies, like all great art, on those few epic themes of desire, loss, regret, politics and the spirit.