ETERNAL RETURN

It took me almost the whole of December to make this very short video and what I've learned is that I want to go back to painting.

I started with a desire to express feelings of nostalgia, sadness and mystery about my Russian ancestry, my father and his relatives, known and unknown, and bewilderment about the impermanence of life and the tenacity of personality, of family resemblance, of faces fusing into other faces. 

I wanted to make a video that would be like a painting but with gentle movement taking place at various distances from the spectator. I built a kind of mini stage-set out of three cardboard boxes, one inside the other, with windows cut out of the back, roof and sides. I painted the inside of the boxes so that when lights were placed between them, you could see the colours of rooms behind rooms. On sheets of acetate I printed (digitally, through ink-jet printer) small photos of my Russian relatives, cut them out, then hung them on gold threads from wooden bars and from the ceilings of two front boxes. What I didn't take into consideration was that the camera and the naked eye are two altogether different species. The depth that my naked eye perceived was completely lost when the camcorder was pointed in the same direction. 

Here is the final version, after discarding about seven others. It's a compromise but I don't dislike it. I borrowed one of Alexander Vertinsky's songs for the soundtrack because he fits the mood so well and because my father liked him so much. I couldn't find a clip of his particular favourite, which started with (pardon my phonetics - I don't speak Russian but understand a few words): Ti sidish adinoke....(You sit alone, staring at the flames....) There are lots of Vertinsky songs on YouTube and if you like the nostalgic chansonnier style, look him up.

Here's the permalink from VIMEO (it's a bigger screen over there) if you can't see it below.

  

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LATEST STATE OF DNA PAINTING AND PRE-BIRTHDAY REQUESTS

I've been working on it, hoping to finish before my birthday (August 7) but I can't predict what the painting wants to do. Here you see it in my studio and how it sort of flows into the surroundings. I think I'm going to change the title to PRISM . The colours in this photo do not accurately represent the real thing.

Speaking of birthday: can I have some requests as to what you, my loyal visitors, would like as my birthday post? You know, like those radio request programmes. I will try to comply with your wishes, unless they are awkward questions like, how old are you?. The answer to that, my friends, is blowing in the wind. 

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CHAOS TURNING INTO DNA

I've temporarily titled the painting My DNA. I thought it would be interesting to record its various states because the end result may be quite different to the beginning and it's a way to preserve the process. 

Everything in the picture is an edited version of things I see around me, including parts of other artworks. Building the composition from these fragments is selectively random: if a shape catches my eye, I'll put it in but not necessarily in the same place. In this process the painting is acquiring an order that looks nothing like my cluttered studio but that you could still recognise if you walked in there.

Central to the design are the figures of my parents, five times removed from reality: I am painting them from an unfinished painting which was based on an old snapshot and they were, of course, more real than that photograph and now they are gone, though their known and unknown history is still alive in me, consciously and unconsciously, as I sit in messy upstairs studio creating an illusion of orderly space with material paints on material canvas. 

In making art what has always intrigued and frustrated me is the conflict between working from life and working from imagination (which is also the conflict between abstraction and representation). I love painting from life, it's incomparably thrilling, but there always comes a point when I feel dominated, subjugated by the real and want it to get out of my way. Then down and down, round and round I go to that old black magic of inner images and concepts and that's exciting too but, oh, there comes a time when I long for the fresh air of face to face contact with the light, the shade, the shape, the space of the three dimensional so-called real world. 

As you can see in state 2, I've introduced a still-life of my palette in the foreground and will paint this as realistically as possible. But it leads into planes and perspectives which do not exist in reality and which arise spontaneously out of of some kind of inner logic. So, while I can't claim to be resolving the conflict, at least it's an attempt to do so. Only black and white thus far but colour is coming.

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