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.

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.

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.

I suppose this is, in a way, a follow up to your post the other day. More directly it is a response to an image I have just starting working on.

Many of my paintings sourcfe found imagery, staged photographic images and other photographic sources. Normally, however, the image is a fragment of a new synthetic construction. It is analysed and detached from cotnext and given a new location in a woder field.

So it is interesting when the odd image strikes me and inspires a failry direct translation from found image to final image. This was the case with an image I found two days ago of a young british 10m diver in the daily sports pages.

I knew almost straight away I wanted to use the whole iamge. Not to break it up, dissovle chunks or introduce it too a new set of surroundings.

 Initially I did two small drawings and then today I started working on a canvas, 40inch x30inch.

Fisrtly the enlarging of the image is going to give a new sense of heroism to the subject, but this is old, tired and obvious ground to go over.

What interests me is the chocies I deem necessary to make in the recreation of the image. No painter ever copies truthly, even if they want to. They are always forgetting, remering in a new way, fiddlings, shifting and moving the image towards a new altered end point.

Look at Manet’s work, in this instance his ‘Balcony’ painting of 1870. Look how geometric the coposition is, the rigid retangular nature (a direct descendant of David) in its organisation and linear composition. He reorganises what he saw(either in life or in a photographic image) sytemmatically giving it a new sense of order and structure. Its almost a form of purification.

I realised I was attempting to do something similar today, without even being consciously aware of it. Firstly I divided the canvas up, not as the orignal image was, but in a slightly altered structure. I made the height in which both the pool and the crowd sat in identical. Both were 15 inches high, making the two of them create a square (as the canvas is 3o inches wide). This then left 10inches, and a quarter of the height, for the space in which the diving board and diver would sit. Before I had even added in the specific infomration I had divided the space into a mathematical and balacned format, altering the less rigid structure of the photograph. It was intuative, which is what I find fascinating.

Its as if we have a conversation with the photograph and the blank canvas. On the one hand we are looking to fulfill the mimetic function of recapturing the image. On the other we are aware of the abstract formal qualities of the painted surface. We desire to have harmony, to have balance. Its as if the dialogue between painted space and photographic images ensures we are honest to both truths.

 Since then the crowd has been drawn in and the diving board and diver. I now have a layout which will allow me to find a certain amount of autonomy in surface and colouration. Alloowing me to shift away from the specifics of the origianl source to capture what it is I think I saw in the original image. A sense of dramatic tension, a odd interest in the activity as a spectacle, of the audience inside and outside the cnavas interracting. I don’t wan’t to say too much more about this as I want to try carry working on this image without too much preconceived baggage or agenda. Mydesire to paint it has seen me skip a few ofthe normal stages of construction. I have no idea at this point if this enriches or empoverishes the potential outcome.

Francesca Woodman

In my first year teaching no artist has been referenced or spoken about by students more than Francesca Woodman.  She is neither as famous or as in your face noticeable as many other artists, yet something about her draws numerous people to her work. 

Woodman died at the tragically young age of twenty two, having only produced 800 prints. It would be wrong to assume that her fame or interest in her work is the by product of her youthful passing. Of course, as with Cobain/Keats and many others, it adds and projects a certain amount of meaning onto the work. yet the exists an autonomous power to her images that makes the worth discussing.

Woodman’s photographs explore many of the tricks of the trade familiar to student photographers. Double exposure, slow shutter speeds and low lights.  Technically her images are perhaps no more sophisticated than many a young photographer. But how she harnesses these devices to create her images is what stands her out. 

She becomes an actress in empty and eeeire interiors. The architecture becomes a stage which she does not just play on but through. Moving around so that she dissolves and fades into the worn walls.  What remains of her presence in the final image is no more important than what has been lost. Image a figurative response to Whiteread’s work. 

Francesca Woodman’s images seem to be about a struggle or attempt to disappear, to fade away. The architecture is both what traps and what provides a vehchile for some kind of escape. Slippery transient moments are paused. Figures, which seem to be metaphors of wider conditions, seem to resonate with our inherant concerns with the human condition. Rather than her young death being a tragedy which we project onto the images; is it not a case that her images articulate a particular understanding and struggle with the tragic which lead her to suicide. Either way, they are deeply moving image which, in my tired state, I have not been able to deconstruct effectively. 

Postmodernism.

As Dick Hebdige pointed out (“A report from the Western Front: Postmodernism and the ‘politics’ of style” 1986-87) Postmodernism has become a catch all term capable of being appropriated to describe an almost limitless range of things. We apply the phrase to the styled approach of contemporary painting, the design of a building, sampling and scratching in music, 9/11, the nature and development of technologies such as television and the internet, the manner in which a text is deconstructed, the interdisciplinary approach of new University courses, the destabilising of subject matter, the lose of subject, the implosion of meaning, the apocalyptic paranoia of a generation of post war baby boomers, the collapse (semi collapse) of sociological hierarchies, the lose of structure, the flattening of the political landscape, the rise of religious fundamentalism, the lose of place, responses to Einstein’s theories of relativity, the quotative and pastiche, the non existence of history and seemingly anything to which in contemporary culture which is mildly ironic. At worst it is meaningless, at best utterly confusing in its complexity. Despite this it continues to be the word of choice for many commentators looking to tie down something intangible about the present.

By its nature Postmodenrism is obviously defined by modernism. This throws up certain complexities in itself. In art historical terms alone modernism is a dichotomy. On the one hand it refers to Greenbergian notions of art for arts sake, of the closed door on association and an entirely formal, Kantian mode of meaning. On the other it has a Bauddelairian history, referring to the notion that art should celebrate the heroism of modern life, a realism explicitly about the here and now in which the work is produced.

Despite these contradictions it is possible to notice common trends across all disciplines in terms of the modern condition and the values it celebrates. It is a condition for absolute values, for the singular belief which needs to be empirically measurable and preferably tangible. It craves certainty as a notion of understanding. It allows for shifts in beliefs systems, such as the destruction of religions overbearing power, but insists on new systems to replace the old. Thus we end up with capitalism, in the West at least, which put economic structures as a mode to judge relative value. It fights for reason, certainty, progress and the new. It is a way of thinking which is capable of justifying the barbaric, reasonless, mass murder; and its manner, of the First World War battle fields. (As such Dada reaction to WW1 with its focus on irrationality can be seen as the early seeds of post-modern thought)

Modernism articulates linear progression, vertical hierarchies; singular centres and sees time as a horizontal line moving forwards and upwards. It is seen in the clear ordering of history in museums, denying the reality of the past as a mass of atoms lost in chaotic confusion. It looks to give this, and everything, the same definable and measurable coordinates that it presumes physical space has. It gives things values which can be ordered, such as ascribing notions of greatness to artists who we place into a Canon.

Postmodernism is thus the shift from this safe ground, which for ease of analysis we should falsely see as homogenous. We can loosely, although inaccurately, locate this shift as a result of tensions and rumblings in the 1950’s and 60’s. Think Cold war, Vietnam, student protests, human rights movements, the growth of literature on women’s rights, social and political unease, the threat of nuclear war, developments in theories of relativity and the attempted deconstruction of social hierarchies. Each of these events is an attack, or the preparation for an attack, on our previous nature of existence.

The foundation of the above occurrences provides a platform from which to undermine the singularity and uncertainty of much modernist thought. New approaches demanded an inquisition. ‘Feminism’ challenged the gender biases of the west. Non western approaches showed up the ludicrous imperialistic values which form simplistic and western cantered binary oppositions such as the civilised vs the primitive. Our place as the forward thinking, monarchal power above the backward and basic ‘other’ was attacked. Marxist approaches called into question the bourgeoisie’s position of power which created repetitive social structures of separation and status. New historians highlighted the artificial nature of linear and logical historical systems. The falsity and constructed nature of our reality was revealed.

Previously many disciplines had attempted to exist in isolation, celebrating their own uniqueness. The associations between each discipline and of each to wider values was denied, suddenly we were demanded to open the door for cross disciplinary discussion. The hierarchy, isolation and value systems of every facet of existence had been fractured to the point of bankruptcy. A paradigm shift was demanded. A multicentred reality was created. The post-modern era had arrived.

The implosion of our values has led to a position where anything goes, where new means of production and consumption are demanded. It embraces the constant evolution of new media. It promotes a knowing pastiche, a subversion of types, a quotation of what has gone before, a denial of originality, the death of the author, the denial of meaning. Irony, humour are too the fore.

Movements, schools and styles are a thing of the past, to an extent. A painter might perhaps have a closer link to a scientist or musician than another painter. Our field of reference and influence is democratised, all barriers have been dissolved. All logical structures are eroded.

Freedom is a strange thing. Without the past frameworks we can feel lost. When we can do anything, in any way, about anything than a ironic creative paralysis runs through our veins. Instead of having found a utopian liberty we are actually lost, maples; floating in unknowingness. Fundamentally this is where we are today. Lost and grappling for something to trust and believe in, aware how flawed a desire that is. We know we need rules and structure else we dissolve into nothingness. Equally, how can one be set free when there is no longer a controlling devise to be set free from. Totally freedom suffocates.

It is also worth mentioning Gerhard Richter here, a most eloquent and intellectual of minds. The postmodern human arrogantly dismisses ideologies. He speaks of some idealistic ultra democratic process. Yet having or wanting no ideology is an ideology in itself. This is suitable paradoxical.

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.

“If I want to take a picture, I take it no matter what”

I think this statment is crucial to Goldins work. She is certainly an artists whose work begins to make sense when we view it in series. There is a directness, and an intimacy about her work which seems to deny the camera was even present. This is surely a result, paradoxically, of its ever presence. Only by it being a constant can her subjects forget it exists.

The personal and erotic seem to be able to be transfered from a public to a private domain without any of the staging or pornification of other imagery so explicit in content. This is not to say they don’t have drama. The lighting, as she admits, is almost Caravegesque at times.

She is often conpared to Diane Arbus but I tihnk that is lazy. There is an artificiality and personal slant to Arbus’ work which is not so present in GOldin’s. Goldin’s work is far more explicitally about her disapearance adn the capturing of the subject. Arbus seems to project the self onto the subject. This is not a judgement of absolute quality but of relative difference. If we are making judgments though, I prefer Goldin…hence I wrote this blog.

There is something about Ted Hughe’s poetry which I would love to condense into a sticky paste and then vomit back out in visual form. The relationship ebtween literature and painting frustrates me. When someone expresses a certain quality so eloquentally in words the attempt to translate that into a visual equivalent leads to mindless image making nad illustration. I have no interest anymore in taking images from Hughes’ poetry and putting them into my work, as I did with the Crow like figure. The iamges are not what I am after, they are merely the narrative vehicles he uses to capture and convey the essence I admire. Taking the vessel which carries the meaning but pouring out said meaning is kind of ridiculous.

I think, this said, that its Hughes’ ability to capture the dark and underlying tragic themes of humanity with a brutal and cynical accuracy and a stunning wit that I love.

I think Daniel Richter maybe has this in his paintings.

 For your delight here is Ted Hughes’ ‘Crow’s Nerve Fails’ from his collection ‘The Crow’

Crow, feeling his brain slip,
Finds his every feather the fossil of a murder.Who murdered all these?
These living dead, that root in his nerves and his blood
Till he is visibly black?How can he fly from his feathers?
And why have they homed on him?

Is he the archive of their accusations?
Or their ghostly purpose, their pining vengeance?
Or their unforgiven prisoner?

He cannot be forgiven.

His prison is the earth. Clothed in his conviction,
Trying to remember his crimes

Heavily he flies.

Ted Hughes

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.