Please help.

The black dog is yapping at the door to my sleeping bag, and he won’t go away.

You must know what this feels like, lest you forget the rambling man in gin-sodden overalls that would tap-tap-tap on the mirror of my tutu, late at night, begging for harmony.

I could never offer harmony, only my perpetual freehand.  My pneumatic drill of a hand, with rampant energy and an overture of half-baked desires.  You’d take it up anyway, even though you knew it would leave you feeling lemony-fresh.

Well, my perpetual freehand is perpetually free again. Twitching.

If only I could ram a screw into it, pin it to a piece of wood, but I hear this has been done by another fairly recently and a fat lot of good it did him.  My other hand is pretty useless anyway, doesn’t have a poker face, would never get it in in-time.

Yapping in the alley and kicking bins over in frustration, red eyes bulging and a permafrost clinging to its huge hanging balls.  Disdainful creature.  Black dog, back-yard dog. It doesn’t just wait, but revels in the constancy of madness.  Once your mad, your always mad.  You can try the glove on, to see if it fits and then you find its a chinese puzzle, the more you pull the tighter it gets.

I wish my hand was permafrost but its always hot. My red right hand. My filtching, feltching godhand.  Hurling thunderbolts into the arses of well composed daydreams.

I’ll wail into the bag and wait to see if I answer.  That way I’ll know if it’s real or not.

‘A Lovers Discourse- a reply’

This is a reply to Roland Barthes ‘A Lover’s Discourse’. The original text sees Barthes writing about a single figure and the nature of their internal discourse caused by the ‘other’. The protagonist is sometimes present, sometimes absent, sometimes imagined.

The book is not organised in a linear narrative or in some form of philosophical hierarchy which moves clearly through varies levels of thought. Instead it is disjointed musings, displayed as fragments, on the condition in question. The fragments are organised alphabetically to provide a structure which does not turn the text into a singular doctrine.

The further I reached into the book the more I realised that numerous threads seem, to me anyway, to link into concerns in some of my paintings; these being predominantly desire and the single male figure and its relation to a female protagonist.

It feels important to try and make sense of the thoughts that emerged from the text. These vary from direct analyse of specific ideas to the development of an idea which derived as a tangent of reading the book but which has, perhaps, broken totally from the book as a source.

At this point I feel that the thoughts would be restricted if I either worked through them chronologically (as they came about within the book) or into some thematically (as this could limit the scope of them to what I think, in a preconceived manner, they are about.) So it seems logical to mirror Barthes. To take the fragments which have emerged as a deconstruction and reaction to the text and to reorder them alphabetically, under titles which loosely summarise the theme/content of the particular thought. Read the rest of this entry »

Tragedy is not singular. Each artform has its own form of tragedy, as does life itself. Lifes tragedy is obvious, the inevitability of death as a consequence of birth.

Narrative, literary, tragedy is the closest to this. Moving through time and space it necessitates plot. The tragedy in narrative is always tied up in cause and effect. What will happen is an inevitable consequence of what is happening, the end is defined by the start.

Photographic tragedy is different. The photograph is about a moment in reality which had been. Its static nature only focus our attention on the inevitable death of the moment recorded. It is not held in eternity but killed and embalmed. Photography is never about idealism but the depressing realism, the shadow of reality. Its oppositions are tragic reminders of lifes tragic transcience. 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

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.

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.

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

 Jacob Polley really does write the most beautiful of poems. A contemporary poet whose verses seem imbued with a kind of timeless quality, as if they have been around as long as we have known. Simple, effective, evocative and able to imbue the humble with a sense of the sacred and profound. He brings a light and importance onto the small things.

JACOB POLLEY

A Jar of Honey

You hold it like a lit bulb,
a pound of light,
and swivel the stunned glow
around the fat glass sides:it’s the sun, all flesh and no bones
but for the floating knuckle
of honeycomb
attesting to the nature of the struggle

 I had forgotten how good Seamus Heaney was. Then I remembered.

I To-night, a first movement, a pulse,
As if the rain in bogland gathered head
To slip and flood: a bog-burst,
A gash breaking open the ferny bed.
Your back is a firm line of eastern coast
And arms and legs are thrown
Beyond your gradual hills. I caress
The heaving province where our past has grown.
I am the tall kingdom over your shoulder
That you would neither cajole nor ignore.
Conquest is a lie. I grow older
Conceding your half-independant shore
Within whose borders now my legacy
Culminates inexorably. IIAnd I am still imperially
Male, leaving you with pain,
The rending process in the colony,
The battering ram, the boom burst from within.
The act sprouted an obsinate fifth column
Whose stance is growing unilateral.
His heart beneath your heart is a wardrum
Mustering force. His parasitical
And ignmorant little fists already
Beat at your borders and I know they’re cocked
At me across the water. No treaty
I foresee will salve completely your tracked
And stretchmarked body, the big pain
That leaves you raw, like opened ground, again

Seamus Heaney