Further experiments in ink and bleach. These Winsor & Newton colours are all obnoxiously bright to begin with, and the effect of the bleach varies: it knocks a garish aquamarine back to a nice, faded denim colour but it turns emerald ink into a hideous acid green. I tried to subdue this figure with a wash of purple but I think it’s less interesting as well as less offensive now. 

I’m having enormous trouble with colour in general lately. I can’t get colours to chime. I’ll either have to start limiting my palette again or just be more considered in my approach and plan in advance how I want different parts of a painting to interact. Booooo-ring. 

Ink, bleach, watercolour & pencils on Bockingford paper, approx 12"x6".

I’m digging up bodies. 

I have a couple of large-scale landscape-based paintings that I’ve been working on, off and on, for months now. But these weird figurative elements keep popping up. At first I thought it was force of habit – a pointy rock looked like a knee or an elbow only because I’m accustomed to drawing people. Then I thought it was happening because I missed drawing people; moss and leaves are boooring. Then I fished several different paintings out of the pile and propped them up around the studio and realised these references to the body are everywhere. 

There’s things that look like teeth and toenails and blood and knees and bones all over the place. Organs at an autopsy, slick and discoloured. Cracks in a cliff-face look like thighs or cleavage and a feathery, rosy red the colour of mouths and and fingertips seeps from crevices. It might sound really stupid that I didn’t notice I was doing this, but there it is. 

I have a new theory. I’m wondering if these paintings are really an expression of wanting to be able to relate to something beyond my own body. I sometimes wish I could be objective. I wish I could get out of this skin and all its attendant inconveniences I just don’t want to deal with at the moment – gender, sexuality, deficiency, clumsiness. I don’t want to worry about how my own identity affects the work, or how the work is read by others. I don’t want to have to stop painting just because I’m hungry or my joints hurt from crouching. I don’t want to have to drop everything and go find medical supplies because I’m so amazingly clumsy I managed to stab myself in the leg with a Stanley knife and my thigh popped open like a burst zipper. 

Of course, if I didn’t have a body, I couldn’t paint and wouldn’t be interested in painting. I’d be some abstract entity of pure energy, like a rubbish Star Trek special effect, with even less manual dexterity than I have now. But bodies keep encroaching on the canvas in the same way my own body keeps encroaching on my experience of the world. Cramping my style. 

But it’s alright.

Photos are details from three different paintings, all oil on canvas. 

Sometimes a painting goes well, sometimes it goes badly. 

This one is not going well. Here’s a record of my attempts thus far to make this lovely model’s face look less like a burst football and more like the girl I know. 

(Oil on canvas, 34"x40")

I’m really bad at portraits. Really bad. I don’t know why. It’s not that I can’t draw faces, I just can’t draw the faces of people I recognise. I’ve discovered that the mental image I have of people I know actually bears very little resemblance to their physical form. If I try to draw someone from memory, I don’t even come close. If I try to draw from a model or a photograph, my preconception of what they look like steamrolls right over what my eyes are telling me. I don’t know why this happens. I cannot shut it off. 

The discrepancies are not huge ones; I don’t give people extra limbs or change their ethnicity or stick a spare ear on or anything. It’s just a combination of tiny oversights and little, subtle alterations that build up into completely the wrong face and it’s really frustrating. 

All this might go some way to explain why I am terrible at remembering faces in daily life. When I’m introduced to someone, my brain accepts their face as a sketch and then doodles all over it and files it away, probably under the wrong name. So when I meet them again, they look only vaguely familiar and I call them the wrong thing. Even if you are ridiculously good-looking, all I will keep is the word “good-looking” as an annotation in the margin. I might have fond memories of things we did or conversations we had but… your face. I just cannot recall your face. 

This is also why stories of love-at-first-sight make me raise an eyebrow. 

The painting above is still a work in progress, with so many things wrong with it I wouldn’t know where to begin.