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.

Multiple fragments are brought together in this image. The foreground is populated by a series of characters that arrive loaded with certain associations. The background is covered buy three frames that depict the same figure in various melodramatic contortions and performances across a bed.

The image looks to deal with narrative in painting. The presentation of various moments in flux, a kind of looped moment of horror, is a nod to such devices in artists such as Titian, bacon and Francesca Woodman.

Rather than present a linear narrative the work looks to play on the ambiguity of painting. Links and associations are made between parts without a coherent whole every being pieced together. The picture collapses under the scrutiny of total logic. The artificiality and instability is apt, as this is a central theme of the works content. Thus the mechanics of viewing reflect the nature of the subject matter.

The martyr is a strange type of hero. Decapitated the figure presents his head, as a trophy, like some medieval depiction of a decapitated saint.

The image attempts to push the horror to a point of excess where the tragedy becomes comedy. The empathy lies not in the extent of the paint but the magnitude of the emptiness. The silent scream is not a destination of true terror, but, through the mirroring of the empty sex, a venue of strange wit.

In Caravaggio’s ‘David and Goliath’ (1610) the hero presents the viewer with the screaming head of Goliath; David remains stoically calm despite the obvious magnitude of his heroism. Viewed from today the image, whilst great, seems ludicrous in the depth of its theatricality.

I restaged the image, performing a series of dramatic poses and gestures which similarly looked hold out a hand as if presenting a victors trophy to the audience. These performances lead to a series of prints.

The emptiness of the hand exposes the figures dramatic self importance to ridicule. His heroic nudity if castrated by his wearing of socks and boxers. Is there anything more pathetic than socks and boxers? The regal crimson and red is merely meant to provide another clash between the figures ideal self image as a hero and the reality of his ineptitude.

The fall is a symbol of romantic heroism, the tragic victim’s descent from a point of idealism. These figures are more pathetic than that, they lack the genuine aspiration to have reached a point from which to have fallen. They lack to ability to of had a dramatic narrative.

Instead they squirm and dance around stages which read as beds. They are performing some excessive act of mourning, a melodramatic cry for attention. They are vacuous figures who merely have the desire for the grand themes of figurative art and humanity.

As such the figures and the architecture search for tension and instability. Created by the two fold play on space they reveal the artificiality of painting.

Dismissing this reading they also seem to be about the ‘lovers discourse’ discussed by Barthes; the single figure excessively mourning the absent other.

Across five frames a figure is scene falling of a horse. The sequence is borrowed from a newspaper image of Zara Phillips. The dynamics of the image interested me, primarily, for the shift from a position of strong verticality, to one of total horizontality. The encoding of such coordinates within the History of Images interests me.

Beyond this the image was of interest due to the iconographical baggage that a figure on a Horse carries. The notion of the figures control of the horse being a metaphor of the control of the state fascinates me. Made around the time of the economic collapse, this images dynamic felt apt.

The figure on the right is a direct quote, restaged through performance, of Titian’s Actaeon (from Diana and Actaeon). Here he becomes the puppet master, revealing (and perhaps provoking) the tragedy which unfolds. He goes from victim to protagonist.

I have started to build up a sereis of character types. My painting’s are increasingly moving towards multi figured narratives. I still think the single male figure will continue to be the main focus on my work. The shift, theatrically speaking, will be from a monologue to a central character with a supporting cast.

I want to approach the build up of this cast with as an openness. The first batch of drawings have been from images borrowed and sources from newspapers. Often they are of a figure (or two0 looking outwards) It shifs back towards the notion of the returned gaze and the protagonist. Ideally I would like to catch something of Manet’s single figures, that reverie and detachment, that introspective melancholy. It is the denial of the communication offered that seems to be the striking feature of his figures.

These two lads above disturb ne slightly. Those plastic smiles, smug grins pulled across mask likfe faces. I like the thought that perhaps they are saying, ‘We know something you don’t know’.

I have recently been do a series of drawing of figures who seem to be holding there own head, which is detached from there body. They begun as the product of a monoprint mistake, where I forgot to insert a neck (very neckligent…could not help the pun).

 The mistake sparked an interest, the figure made me laugh, so I started consciously pursuing these figures who seem to have inacted some kind of self decapitation. I wanted them to be a bit comic and ridiculous and called them ‘the boy whose head fell off’.

Today I made an alteration on figure in a new work which is based on Michelangelo’s David. David now appears to be holding his own head, as if having pulled it out of its socket. I suddenly reminded me of other images of David, the victor holding Goliaths head in his hand. It seemed interesting that David could perhaps holdin, victoriously, his own head in his hand. As if he was both David and Goliath, hero and villian, victim and victor, beast and man. It seemed to both deconstruct the history of the heroic male figure and play on trgic, but more importnalty, witty and comic ideas.

I have attached a photoshop mock up of an altered version of Carravagio’s David and Goliath. 

 I am currently starting on a series of drawings which look to develop a cast of character types, almost figures from some particular, currenlty unknown, race. They all seem to have pig noses. I think i might start working on a sereis of illustrations of this David like figure holding his one head, as if victorious. i like the idea of him also pushing the sword between hislegs, as if the threat of castration is present.  

The Whale is back in town!!  Yeehaa its been a while.  Hello fans, and hello strangers, lets acquaint ourselves and be friends.

Painters who strive to remain open in their practice, where the act of painting avoids finding a solution/meaning sometimes until the very last brushstroke.  What techniques and systems do artists develop in order to reach this aim?  Matthias Weischer, Neo Rauch, Phoebe Unwin etc.

A painter whose context appears to remain open right to the death is the type of artist I most want to emulate.  Those decisions which can totally alter the direction of a work, when the work seems to be heading down a set path are the bravest of decisions, and you hear the great artists of the past talk about these moments in interviews and books.  These are defining moments in a works trancendence because they move apparently from an area of received wisdom into area’s where they end up discovering their own wisdom and resolution.

Phoebe Unwin, whose show was recently on at Wilkinson gallery in London tries to solve this issue by coming to the painting with no preconceptions of what she is going to make, this sounds like it could be a bit of a short cut or fake out, although actually when you try to follow the same path, you realise how hard it is to successfully do.  In essence the whole journey becomes about trying to resolve a problem whilst simultaneously denying yourself any notion of what it is you are trying to resolve.  Any point at which you begin to find a comfort zone, you force yourself out of it, towards the unknown.

Matthias Weischer achieves something similar, taking on board Cezanne’s principle of the questioning eye to constantly reinterpret and alter the spaces which he is creating.  Objects resolve only to be lost in memory and time.  It is interesting for me to think whether this solution in the soluble is indeed found through the constant questioning and rejigging of the spaces and objects, or whether its all in fact a clever illusion, where Weischer paints in objects, fully aware that he will again paint them out, leaving only traces of their existence.  It is probably somewhere inbetween, much like the case of the happy accident, where a good painter is able to create an environment in which he/she knows certain effects can be created, without ever having full control over the outcome.  Neo Rauch exists again within a similar space, however, he seems to be reacting almost immediately as the painting is being produced, it becomes much more about the intuitive, autonomous reaction to what is going on at that very moment.  As such, it is completely plausible that a tree can pop up sticking horizontally out of the side of the painting in an instantaneous reaction to the composition that is being developed, and then will alter the rest of the composition from then on, as Rauch strives to weave a certain sense into his dream images.

I come to this problem, just as I start to take more of an interest in the sculptural scenes that I am producing to aid in my paintings reality.  And so, the painting and sculpture are forming a symbiotic relationship, neither directly copying the other, but being produced at the same time in order to constantly throw up interesting opportunities and opening which the other disipline can take advantage of.