Work in progress, mixed media on canvas, 100x100cm.
So, I salvaged this old canvas from my friends’ apartment recently because they were moving out. (Here’s an overview of its troubled history.) Over the years in their smoky living room it had gathered layer upon layer of dust and nicotine and cobwebs so by the time I retrieved it, it consisted of several failed paintings buried a hazy field of white paint, now yellowed and filthy with a sticky film of grime.
I took it home, cleaned it down with turpentine and added a fresh coat of gesso, deliberately thin and patchy so as not to drown the textures. I even primed the back, to cover a few fraying weaknesses in the canvas and stifle an incipient mould colony.
It probably hardly seems worth saving, but honestly, I love this sort of work. The older and more layered a painting is, the more it engages me. The thick crust of failure palpably marring the surface doesn’t bother me in the least. I just think: now we’re getting somewhere. Whatever I might ultimately make of it, I feel like it will be a more honest work because it at least alludes to all the past experiences and investigations and breakdowns that inform the final layer. I don’t want to conjure an image out of the ether, like an uninformed opinion. I don’t want the painting to look as if it unfolded all at once, like a storm. I want to see the changing of seasons, I want to detect some unfathomable unravelling, like the rotation of a galaxy. Chances are there have been many false starts, much doubt, several fruitless excursions that seemed promising at the time, and at least one abject surrender in every painting of worth that I have made. All the better if some symptom of it all remains visible.
Why shouldn’t a painting have scars? I have scars.
So I’ve started again, building new layers. I still don’t know where it’s going.
