DNA PAINTING, STATE 4

To anyone who visits here regularly, sorry for the long gaps lately. I've been otherwise engaged but will return and take up all unfinished business (including La Vie en Rosé) very soon. Am away from tomorrow until early next week but meanwhile, here's an update on the painting. The palette and brushes in the corner on the right of this photo are the real ones - just in case you're wondering. 

 
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DNA PAINTING, STATE 3

Colour slowly creeping in. Very difficult to keep relating it to what I'm seeing, which is what I'm aiming to do.

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KINDS OF GENIUS

My cyber-friend Wally (alias crackskullbob, alias Wally Torta etc.) who is a kind of genius - I say kind of because that leaves me room to escape from the authorities in case they declare he's not a full-blown genius - has just posted his drawing of me from a recent photo which I put on Julia Kay's Portrait Party,. He accompanies this terrific sketch with one of his free-associating verbal flights of imagination which are a constant feature of his blog-writing and drawing, like the inspired riffs of jazz musicians. I love this ability to leave behind the prosaic gravity of everyday thinking by playfully following any clue that presents itself - a name, a word, a passer-by, a shadow, a sound - and simply taking off with it, wherever it may lead. I say that this weightlesss space-travelling talent is one of the essential components of genius in any field, and the authorities be damned if they disagree. 

I've done a couple of new portraits for JKPP which you can see here and also on my portraits page. 

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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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UPSTAIRS AND THE UNBEARABLE NECESSITY OF CHAOS

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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TEN RANDOM QUESTIONS ABOUT LOVE

1. What is the question to which love is the answer?
2. Is love a feeling or an interaction?
3. Can love be felt without a love-object?
4. If it's an interaction, what's the minimum number of participants?
5. Does love of one's self feel the same as love of an other?
6. For love to persist, is a loving response required?
7. Why are love and happiness usually considered to be a pair?
8. Why are love and unhappiness so frequently seen together?
9. Can there be love without joy? Or joy without love?
10. What is this thing called love? 

Any answers? 

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THERE IS A SEASON TO UPDATE THE UPKEEP, TURN TURN TURN

Maybe it's because of the better weather but this time of year brings out my governmental instincts ie: cleaning up, clearing out, re-organising, making new lists, tearing up old lists, feeling guilty about having failed to do all the things on all the lists sooner, and so on. The local charity shop has received yet another huge bundle from me and my website, the online version of home, is also the focus of my beady-eyed resolve to IMPROVE THINGS BY GETTING RID OF STUFF AND ADDING MORE STUFF IN DIFFERENT PLACES. Elimination followed by accumulation. Turn turn turn. 

My ART pages in particular badly need a make-over. For the moment, I've added a portrait section. You can see some recent faces over there and maybe you'd like to bookmark the URL? I'll be updating it frequently. Thanking you. 

Back to my duties now. 

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WORDS AND PICTURES

Dylan, creator/editor of the brilliant tinywords, has chosen one of my poempictures as the cover of the latest issue of this international daily magazine of haiku and micropoetry. I am lost for words to say how delighted I am, so a simple thank you will have to do. 

Another reason to celebrate is that I've finally reached what seems to me to be a happy ending for a portrait I've been working on lately of Jehane Markham, a neighbour and fine poet/playwright. As The Jehane Markham Trio  she reads her work with a backing of two musicians - a subtle, original and hugely enjoyable blend of jazz and poetry. Rough Winds Productions was created with her partner, the actor Roger Lloyd Pack, "to support the search for pleasure and understanding in the poetic realm". You may remember I did a sketch of Roger reading The Wasteland  four years ago (scroll to April 13, 2006 ). He's performing it again on June 3rd at the Free Word Centre and Jehane will be presentingThe London Series with her trio. I'll be there for sure. 

Jehane sat for me for two hours and I made a good start then proceeded to wreck the painting slowly and surely in the next few weeks. There's no explanation for BUAPGSS (Buggering-Up-A-Perfectly-Good-Start Syndrome) but I'm sure you know what I'm talking about. Anyway, I gradually dragged the portrait out of the limbo it was threatening to remain in and did something I haven't done before: I painted words as a background to the face: her words, a poem that I like so much: Fear of Falling. Somehow it all came together then. What do you think? 

The poem is in her collection THIRTY POEMS  published by Rough Winds. The last five lines, hard to read in this photo, are:

if I'm not careful,
I'll fall right through,
knocked out by emerald knuckledusters,
the weight of water,
electric blue. 

Portrait of Jehane Markham with her poem 'Fear of Falling'. Acrylic on canvas. 50 cm x 40.5 cm. NdA  May 2010

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POST-ELECTION BLUES and a PORTRAIT PARTY

Very disappointed that the Lib Dems didn't get more votes after all the enthusiasm they generated during the campaign. Most of all I'm shocked by the outrageous excuses given for voters being turned away from many polling stations on election night: why isn't more fuss made about this in the media and everywhere? Supposedly, 'an inquiry is under way' but that just isn't good enough. If this were a third world country, there would be world-wide rumblings about ineptitude and conspiracies. But we're a civilised, sophisticated, efficient democracy, aren't we? 

PORTRAIT PARTY 

Some of us prefer art to politics and pay more attention to art than to reality and would rather play than work and can find hundreds of good reasons not to do the things we should be doing in favour of things that have no agenda other than fun. So when I saw on Walt's always fun-supporting blog a mention of Julia Kay's Portrait Party, of course I immediately had to go there and now I'm completely hooked. Here are my first three portraits of artist members of that vibrant ongoing all-day all-night party. I drew these digitally on a graphic tablet, using Artrage software for Wally and Blue Sky Day and Photoshop brushes for Allan. 

ELECTIONEERING

I responded to The Guardian's recent invitation for readers to send in alternative election posters but mine was not among those they chose to print in the G2 section last week. I'm not bothered since I have my own alternative audience right here, haven't I? So here is my take - a Photoshopped montage of bits and pieces borrowed from the internet - on the three-horse race currently taking place here in the not-so-united Queendom.
All politicians, as far as I'm concerned, are endlessly spinning on a carousel which never stops churning out platitudes, promises and palliatives. In the first TV debate between the three current contenders for the top spinning job, the mere fact that there were three of them instead of the usual two (Labour and Conservative) made it slightly more exciting. And when the interloper Nick Clegg began to sound and look like a real human being rather than an airbrushed sound-bitten parody of one, I thought, okay, maybe he'll jump off the merry-go-round and really be the 'something different' his party political message keeps repeating. Besides, he's got an emigré Russian grandmother, a Dutch mother, a Spanish wife, children with Spanish names, and he can speak more than one language. So I'll vote for him. 

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