REVISITED PAINTINGS

About a year ago...or is it two years?...my Italian grand-nephew, when asked what he wanted for his birthday, made a rather unusual request for a young boy: a painting of my sister and me. He was thirteen only a few days ago and he and his father are coming from Rome to see me this weekend.

I started the painting...whenever that was...but wasn't happy with it and turned it to the wall for quite a while. I scraped out and re-started umpteen times until the canvas acquired a rough textured surface. Unable to procrastinate any longer, I have finally finished it. Probably it could still be re-worked but I'm going to leave it as is and hope Emanuel will like it.

I've called it Two Sisters in Time and inserted images of ourselves as children in the faceted background. Dividing a background into vertical strips of variegated colour is something I have found myself doing over and over again for a very long time, going way back to some of my earliest paintings as a teen-ager. It's not a conscious decision - it just happens. The feeling behind it, I think, is a desire to escape from realism into a more abstract dimension, but not entirely. 

Two Sisters in Time  Oil on canvas, 2010-2011 

Below is another painting using vertical facets but I allowed abstraction to dominate this one. It's from 1994 when I had a SPACE studio in Hackney - the first photo was taken there. I had the idiotic idea of using this unstretched painting as a coffee table covering, folding the edges down all around. Thus it remained until a few weeks ago when I suddenly decided that it deserved to be rescued from a utilitarian role and treated more like art. I had to cut off the damaged edges, so the canvas is somewhat smaller than its original version, but I think it's survived life as a tablecloth pretty well.

Hackney studio 1994

Music and Love  Oil on canvas, 1994 

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ABSTRACTING

Still not used to my new camera, tried it out at Borough Market near London Bridge, on my way to the Miro exhibition at Tate Modern. More on that later.

Which do you prefer: the photo of the 'real' scene, or the abstract digital painting I did based on this photo? Does detail matter when conveying one's impression of something seen?

 
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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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