I don’t want Bacon’s silent scream- its deafeningly noisey and the horror is frighteningly real, its gutteral.

I want my painting’s to have the empty scream. The scream which comes out of the mouth and the anus. The pathetic scream of ego without reason. A scream which speaks of a shallow hollowness and artifiical melodrama. I want a kind of collapsing schizophrenia, a scream of paranoia. I want my painting’s to have a scream without context which crumbles under scrutiny and just becomes a silent whimper.

I want my painting’s to have a scream which we laugh at.

 I’m trying to ensure I now use colour more pragmatically, avoiding the mistake of falling in love with particular combinations and using them on mass across a series of works. This kills colour, relegating it it to a decorative and non acting part in the drama.

 I’m trying to find the correct pitch for each particular image.

I am working on a series of drawing at the moment of figures squirming, holding their heads (which have been seperated from their bodies) and cavorting like acrobates across the surface. A vibrant Organge and acid Pink have become dominate colours in the initial drawings. i have falling in love with both colours.

I then found myself tempted to chuck these colours onto all the other drawings I am doing, including a series of floating and swimming figures. This would have been a mistake.

The floating figures are melancholic. The images want a quiet tension, a calmness, a solitude, restfullness and in limbo feel. Everything about the particular Orange and Pink goes agasint this.

The reason they work in the ‘boys whose head came off’ series is to do with the mood those pieces seek. They want excess, horror verging on wit, to be pathetically egoticial, bloated melodrama, noisey and ludicrous. The colours intrinsic properties fit in this. Both are saturated, artificial , false and aggressive. I fell for them becasue of a synergy between image and colour.

This is all very obviousy but I had not perhaps appreciated it fully before.

Drawing works, for me anyway, when it has a variety of pace. It  needs the line which evokes, with speed and economy, only just liaterally holding onto the barest mimetic framework. It also needs to detailed line, the slow burning line which with care and precision denotes the specifics, pedantic tennants of the objective eye.

These various lines work like instruments in an orchestra. The musical analogy is overplyes i know. They create both varying rhythms and melodies. The rhythm is in the pace of the line and the melody in the intrinsic formal qualites created by the pace. in the case of drawing melody is the sub product of the rhythm. The melody is the thickness, the thiness, the harshness or the delicacy. The rhythm is the actual physical and visual movment which reminds of the hand and pulls the eye dancing across the page.

 We can only find resoance, and harmony, when these rhythms coexist. Without this dialogue we are left with a monolgoue. its either the pedantic bore of the myopic detail or the nonsensical move to abstraction of the evocation.

Everything collapses

Everything falls

Every structure constructed will eventually come under the impact of some equivalent to gravity.

The combination of intrinsic flaws of idealism and the exterior dependance of change ensure that the rise is followed by the fall

In all cases, whether outside or existence or central to it, we just stand by and watch the beauty of the spectacle

The tragic inevitability of the collapse is the one constant drama we can rely on

dysphoria

Painting is dysphoria. ‘An impatience under affliction: morbid restlessness: uneasiness: want of feeling of wellbeing.’ (chambers concise dictionary)

The single figure always refers to another, whether that other is absent or present. The figures desire, actions are defined by this other.

 This does not necessarily root painting in narrative, although it does imply a causal link between the central character and other facets.

Such a link can be establish on the grounds of a justification which exists outside of the linear nature of literay time. The panic, the state, the impact can be a permanent condition brought on by the other. It need no be the direct effect resulting from a previous cause. The two are symbiotic rather than intrinsically linked in a historic hierachy.

The protagonist, I am suggesting, need not precede the victim. There states can both exist in the eternal now, the moment of flux, which the painting deals with.

On another note, we need no depict the protagonist. We only need focus on the ‘victim.’ The protagonists prescence or existence can be suggested by an unseen ofstage prescence. Hints of exists or doorways can potentially imply this.

I am continuing to attempt to make progress with the painting of flesh. I think one crucial realisation is my awarness of my lack of knowledge or innate ability with this particular, crucial, facet of my work. Previous thoughts on this subject have also espoused an overall dogmatic and scientific approach to painting flesh. I do feel though, with the help of Andy, that I have made some advancements.

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This picture has really struck a chord with me. I think you have found that stillness, but with tension and balance, that you so admire in Vermeer and Weischer. It is without doubt this particular quietness that gives the picture and unsettling melancholy.

The space and the colour in this work are also excellent. I thinkn this is your best work yet. If we do a swap in the near future I ‘want that one’.

Personally I think you have found an avenue which really opens up a particular voice for you. Your complex perosnal narratives and figures are good, but these still lives have a real power.

The later wants noise and the former has silence, either in opposition or acceptance of paintings inherant quietness. The same is true of movement, one craving it in excess and the other accepting its lack of prescence. It is control vs excess, in formal terms balance, harmony and symmetry vs chaos, disharmony and asyymetry.

The melodrama is the theatrical. The desire for a constructed idealism.

The melacnholy is the real. The acceptance of the humble and mundane, a quiet sublime.

The melancholic image alwyas saeems to be the musing of a found subject/image

The melodramaitc image is always constructed, always stage, always actively created.

Exhibition catalogue- Kapellmeister Pulls A Doozy.

Mary sat perplexed, “why, where, when? The solution seems incommunicable. Hmm, is there even a solution?” The people whizz by my window, their faces fuzzy, like dots on one of those old analogue TV’s, can’t seem to focus, can’t see who they are or what they’re thinking. I can’t even see their eye’s, why am I asking myself this?

The sun has moved inexorably along its path and can now be seen glowing, or is that glowering, through my window? Mary was writing something in a pad, on a desk. The day started in a strange mood, the sun appeared to glower through the gap in his curtains as he chewed, deep in thought, on the end of a pencil.Yep, it was definitely glowering. Her scrawl was mesmerising, the type of handwriting they only had in the old days. You don’t see that type of writing these days. People just don’t take the time to practice anymore. Mary screwed up the piece of paper and threw it on the floor, it landed neatly next to another ball of paper and quickly made friends. Read the rest of this entry »