Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge University invited a series of contemporary painters to give lectures on the role of the human figure in their work. The following is my notes for my lecture.
Why I paint the human figure.NB The following is merely notes written in preparation for the talk, it therefore has a fairly loose and conversational feel in the writing.
I found myself digging about in the paper bin at Christ’s today. I felt like a fox. I was looking for old newspapers to search for images in. I filter through the newspaper most days to find something, often not aware what i am looking for, which could stimulate a new ingredient for a future piece. It might be a standing figure who could turn into a protagonist, a group of footballers jumping for a corner who could become one figures sequential move through space or a snap from the holiday section which could translate into a painting laced with melancholy and nostalgia. The search tries to not be preconceived.
The bin provides a fertile compost heap of potential. The newspaper is a cocophany of noise. Melodrama, hyperbole and scaremongering are par for the course in a system which reflects our wider Western psyche with it’s proliferation of imagery. We are literally drowning in visual stimulus, yet we become dead to it, drunk and hungover on the drama of it all.
There seems to be something enjoyable about rediscovering those moments and images which were to be lost to the bin. Holding them, elevating them, painting them, celebrating them and putting them through a juicer to transform them.
In October 2008 I had to give a one hour presentation of the ideas and themes within my work. This was in conjunction with the exhibition at the Museum of Classical Archeology, Cambridge University. Attached, below, are the notes for the talk. I have to give a few more later this year and it will be interesting to see how they evolve from this one. Read the rest of this entry »
Recently drawings I have been making have been onto surfaces preprepared with a variety of marks and colours. Spray paint, inks drips on and paper soaked then stained with colours. Its initial purpuse was to push through some ideas and to evolve certain uses of colour and mark making. It seems to have become more important than that.
The image laid on top (arrived at through monoprinting or projections normally) is entirely linear. it is merely a structure; a skeleton. It is, obvioulsy, hollow and transparent, revealing all the marks and surfaces which sit beneath it.
Certain bits of the figure then get ‘filled’ in. I might, for instance, paint up a head. This more select addition of makrs and colour is obvioulsy, however stylised, towards mimetic ends. Adding colour to describe flesh and form. This sets up a surface dialogue.
Suddenly there are two levels of colour. The marks which sit on the surface without any direct mimetic function. They are detached from such specifics. they are primarily about certain formal delights, about the celebration of the makrs making and presentation on a flat surface. Due to their context and the nature of the image they obviously acquire other roles. Thye take on rhythm and melody, supporting or feeding into the mood of the picture.
The other level, as previously discussed, are those areas of consciously mimetic additions.
The interplay is between areas of the figure which are left and those which are covered. The former creates a sense of a hollow and transparent figures. One which we can reach through and behind to the colour on the surface. The very same colour which we read entirely as sitting on the surface. It has, an odd kind of spatial complication. This fluctuates and pulses with the solid areas, the points where the skeleton is given flesh, where it takes on a sculptural quality.
This gives us two paces, two melodies intertwining with each other.
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.
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.
My work seems to be divisable into two opposing categories, melacholy and melodrama.
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 »
Why have I been fascinated with Edwardian/Victorian photography? Because this was at the birth of paintings new conception. It was a period that involved not just the invention of photography, but, Darwinism and the release of Freuds new theories. Shaking the foundations of the wests once secure philosophical and theosophical footing. At the same time challenging paintings representational authority and opening up avenues for different thought. Read the rest of this entry »
