I've been working on it and staring
at it so much that I decided to take time off and
make a slideshow of some of the stages up to now. There comes
a time in every painting, for me anyway, when every part of it is frozen and something radical must be done in order
to get the flow going again. That's where I am at the moment
but I haven't yet taken any radical steps.
Do you see a black rectangle? The slideshow will start playing in a minute or
two. If it doesn't, you can watch it over at my blip.tv page. Unfortunately, the shape of the video screen doesn't
allow for the whole height of the painting to show and the
panning effect distorts it even more. Ach! Next time I won't
use it.
For some reason, the music doesn't play over here but it works on the main Blaugustine and at blip.tv.
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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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