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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What attracted me to this top
floor
flat when I first saw it was that it had an
upstairs: a small,
awkward-shaped, added-on loft, the sloping ceiling
high enough in the middle for me to stand upright
but not
for any taller people. A space obviously unsuitable
for large
artwork but I took it anyway. Kindly
friends helped to lug my heavy etching press up the
narrow
staircase, I had a sink installed, built racks and
shelves
for my equipment, and for quite a while the place
served
me well enough for printmaking and graphics.
Now, almost sixteen
years later, it's become less of a studio
and more
of a chaotic storage dump. Mea culpa, yes, but I
also blame
the advent of the digital age. The Mac is
downstairs:
that explains everything, doesn't it? A computer, a
graphic
tablet and thou, my muse, and we can happily ignore
all of
that upstairs mess - the paints, the unfinished
paintings,
the broken frames, the stacks of paper, the smell
of solvents, the greasy rags, the bits of wood,
the bottles and jars and boxes and tins and tubes of
art-stuff
which, the less it is used, the more it accumulates
in case
it will be used at a later date.
But wait. Lately I've been
neglecting
downstairs (less blogging, less computering in
general,
did you notice?) and cautiously venturing back
upstairs to
sit there and think. A few
nights ago - late night is usually my decision time
- I resolved to start clearing the chaos. But then I
noticed
that the mess was visually quite intriguing so I
decided
to start a new large painting instead.
You can see its present
stage in the middle of the bottom row of these
photos.
The painting will incorporate, in as yet
unpredictable fashion,
fragments of the things I see upstairs, including
parts of
an old, unfinished painting of my parents when young
(middle
row). The canvas is almost my height, the ceiling
not high
enough for an easel and the room too narrow
and crowded to allow some other support so I
have to
work in a variety of crouching positions. But now I
need the chaos to stay as it is because it's my
current inspiration.
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