Doomed to failure
Over the next fifteen months I shall be working on an extensive series of paintings and prints which take Shakespeare’s plays as their source. King Lear, Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet and MSND are my initial starting points. I have consciously taken four of his most iconic and celebrated plays and will be giving extensive attention to his two most acclaimed tragedies, Hamlet and King Lear.
This body of work has been commissioned by the British Shakespeare Association, to be exhibited at their fifth major conference, which shall be held at Homerton College and the Faculty of Education, Cambridge University in September 2011. Alongside the paintings will be a body of poems by Kiran Millwood Hargrave.
I am particularly interested in getting to the core of Shakespearian tragedy and exploring the difference between tragedy in painting and literature. I am also keen to explore the difference between how the idea of tragedy manifests itself then and now.
One aspect of tragedy in Shakespeare is the idea of inevitability. When Lead first divides his kingdom there is a sense that it will be the cause of disastrous effects. Taking the greatest play by the greatest playwright (by critical and popular opinion) as a source for paintings is potentially hazardous. It is similar to the idea of Icarus’ flight to the sun. But the realist in me says (aware that an analogy is being stretched) that perhaps reaching the sun, wings burnt and plummeting into the sea might even be an achievement beyond the reach of this painter and this project. A more realistic conclusion might be me squirming about on the floor in a desperate attempt to find flight, ending in a fall more like the blind Gloucester’s in Lear. It is almost certain that the aspirations of the project are far more grandiose than the results. It is doomed to failure. There seems to be something tragically inevitable about this failure that might just be, ironically, the closest I get to Shakespearian tragedy.

I have recently spent a short time-out in the Trossachs - Scotlands National Park, situated just above Glasgow - where I hit upon a mini-revelation regarding what I have been photographing and why I have been taking photographs.

You see, I have been quite happy to snap away with my low-quality digital camera, without concerning myself with why I am taking the photographs.  Previously this act has always been related to my painting, I have concentrated on taking shots of scenes or objects that I intended to use in my painting.  With hindsight I can see that I made a significant change during a recent trip to Amsterdam, here it was where I actively begun to take photographs on a whim, snap snap snap, and what a freedom it gave me! Not always thinking what could be used in my ‘real’ work, and instead taking a shot because of the merits of the photograph alone.  Pre-thought has been overtaken by instinct and other mini-revelations have occurred to me because of this, such as taking photographs of water, because I like the abstract qualities you are given when there is no other material to reference against, the play of light upon and within a surface that at one instance reflects the light and at the next, allows the lens to view deep under its surface.  The particular limitations of the camera seem to add to this contradictory outcome; firstly a camera is never able to process enough of the experience to relate it to what minds-eye has remembered of the event, such as the sounds and smells that bombard your senses and affect the memory, secondly, the camera captures an instant in stasis, not the constantly shifting play of light across the surface that is the reality of the experience.

Only when I visited Scotland did I realise the reasoning behind this change in direction.  And it related to something I read a long time ago, so long ago I can’t remember who wrote it, but it goes something along the lines of “photography is the great democratising medium, because it allows untrained amateurs and people without the talent required to compose an image, to capture a beautiful picture, a perfect scene.  The most beautiful elements of amateur photography are the chance happenings, the accidents, that are captured in its instantaneous gaze and cannot be captured in the laborious and time-consuming practise of painting without an act-of-will of the artist.”

I can see now, photography for the medium that it is designed to be. A documentation to show the immediate results of a mind in action, to capture instantaneously those things that interest you.  By then being captured, they are dislocated from the activity of the mind somewhat, and distorted by the mechanics of the camera and photographic medium.  The resultant alteration from the original intent doesn’t interest me so much in trying to find a happy communion between the two, but I am satisfied that once it is placed in photographic form it becomes something else.  I am more interested in maintaining the aesthetic of amateurism and helping to navigate myself through the documentary process.

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.

From 2-3am on the 24th of June Tom de Freston took part in the One and Other Fourth Plinth project. Dressed in boxers, socks and a paper crown, he arrived armed with a wooden sword, water pistol and a megaphone. He interviewed his alter ego for the Varsity newspaper.

Tom de Freston (TdF): This outfit of socks and boxers? It seems to be a parody, aimed to strip yourself of heroism. Add to this the golden paper crown, the wooden sword and the odd white mask, is this all an attempt to make a mockery of power and masculinity?

Napoleon Bonaparte (NB): There is nothing funny about the attack. This is serious. This is war.

TdF: At the start of the performance you crowned yourself with a paper hat. Were we supposed to laugh, because the public’s reaction was one of derision? Read the rest of this entry »

I was lucky enough to be recently given two high end Michael Harding colours. Cerulean blue and genuine Chinese Vermillion. I have now, sparringly, used both. I don’t think I’m a paint snob. I often buy Jacksons own oil paints for the majority of my pallette, convinced they are the exact same as the more expensive brand equivalents. The brand alone is what ups the price, not the product.

You only need to browse through Michael hardings website to realise that his paints are something beyond cost through branding (not that his brand is not a huge part of his sucess). Long story short…

The Vermillion is fantastic, and it should be. It has both a depth of colour and a luminosity which glows. Its almost the other end, in terms of how to work it, from Hardings Brilliant Pink. With the brilliant pink you seem to get the best from it by either mixing or applying and then pulling off, to leave traces and transparent patches. This Vermillion needs to be left to stand alone. Sit it over a colour, but give it enough body that it dominates them. It is a soloist.

The Cerulean blue is in a different league to the current version I have. I used both today. The glow of the standard version seems so artificial in comparison.

I want the surfaces to look like radioactive skins, like a flayed zombie. I want them to throb like an organ, pulsing in and out, as if slowly moving to some inner beat. This provides the first rhythm, over which the composition is laid.

I haven’t done a lot today, but then, I haven’t done a lot wrong. So in that respect, it hasn’t been a bad day.

Roland Barthes’ ‘Mythologies’ is a seminal text on Semiology. It is a lucid, profound and insightful deconstruction of the manner in which Western society prostitutes itself through veils and constructions of signs, signals and symbols. Seemingly disparate subjects are discussed, from ‘Toys’, through ‘Striptease’ and ‘The Writer on Holiday’ to ‘The Great family of man.’

I have recently been working on a series of drawings, photographs and performances all of which take wrestling as their subject. Barthes discussion of this subject has articulated elements which drew me to wrestling, opened up realisations of its further potential and ultimately revealed its capability to be the ideal painterly subject.

“The virtue of all-in wrestling is that it is the spectacle of excess. Here we find a grandiloquence which must have been that of ancient theatres.”

The debauched theatrics, ‘the spectacle of excess’, are the crux of wrestling’s initial appeal to the painter. The pomposity and bombastic nature of wrestling’s linguistics place it firmly under the stylistic, rather than historical, umbrella of the Baroque. It’s the timelessness of Wrestling which makes it such an a[appropriate symbol, Read the rest of this entry »

Everything she references, whether consciously or not, appears to be contained in quotation marks but the citational act is almost inconspicuous, happily lacking the pomp or pious irony so prevalent in much contemporary art. It’s as though the artist is telling us “here’s a shipwreck in the manner shipwrecks apparently demand”, or “let’s pretend that painting this way is still possible and we’ll see what the result is”. And the result is somewhere between playful questioning and genuine emotional investment, the ghosts of past pictorial conventions making themselves present in and through a practice that is “absolutely modern”, receptive enough to entertain – but also transform – selected moments from the art historical archive, reactivating these borrowed or stolen signs of painting so as to recharge and regenerate painting itself. (Letting the Ghosts In: Nadia Hebson, Peter Suchin)

The proposition of the title to this blog, taken from Peter Suchins essay on the artist Nadia Hebson has a massive pull for me at the moment. So much of my research has taken me towards this fundamental question about the problems of knowledge in contemporary society. The notion that we now “know” so much, conversely leaves us with not very much to say other than cynical put downs and ironic quips. The interesting artists around at the moment are the one’s who arrive at their subject with geniune fondness.

For me this problem has resulted in an interest in religious iconography, childhood play and the practice of Shamanism in indigenous communities. I will put some of my works up when I feel they start to succeed in capturing some of the honesty that belief bestows, at the moment they appear to be commenting on the problem without engaging with it. When you look at work by the old masters, or anything up to the modernist period, there is a conviction in the production, the belief that their work means something and can fundamentally change someones perception of the world, the work of today is struck in its majority by a crisis in confidence and often it appears to be the case that the artist avoids opening themselves up to the criticism that they are naive, by finding ways to avoid commiting themselves utterly to their art.

The problem is manifest in 2 ways however, not just is it the artists unwillingness to commit fully to their craft, it is also the audience and their knowingness of the same issues as the artist. There is a certain fear in the audience to be visibly moved by art, although it is ok to be cerebrally moved. I find this strange when the original conception of art was all fire and brimstone, to tell in pictures the stories of religions, to have an immediate emotional impact upon the viewer. Artists have thus attempted to escape from the habituation of cerebral lethargy by the audience by breaking the traditional boundaries of active and passive participation, shocking the viewer into a response.

As an artist I think this space should be explored more thoroughly. Perhaps a healing needs to be performed, the boundary of belief needs to be reinstated between viewer and the artist.