Tag: art

Mural

This was the first piece I started in the disused carpark. (Charcoal, chalk and emulsion paint on concrete.)

I’ve since added a layer of UV sensitive paint, so if you shine a UV light on it, or even just “charge” the paint with a torch for a few minutes, it glows. 

Kind of like this. 

Of course, almost nobody knows this even exists, much less that it’s UV sensitive, but I’m pretty sure it’s safe to tell your secrets to the internet. Yeah? Alright. 

The underground carpark.

It’s very dark down here.

Much of what I’m doing lately revolves around this place. I go down sometimes with friends, who come often to play and record. I’m still working, bit by bit, on this mural, although the weather’s gotten much colder and I can’t hold the chalk for long before my fingers go numb. I’ve also been bringing my violin down here to practice. The echoes are wonderfully rich and very forgiving. I feel less vulnerable when I’m playing, as if the music were a forcefield that I am generating, keeping some undefined threat at bay. It feels powerful. There’s a weird sensation of momentum, slashing the darkness with the violin bow, like some machete-wielding explorer hacking through jungle. Until I stop. Then the silence rushes in and I suddenly feel very exposed. 

I’m also slowly working on a piece of choreography for that place. I don’t have much to say about that just yet, but at the moment I imagine videotaping, altering and projecting a solo performance, probably to an audience of no one at all. In general, I prefer any finished work of mine to be several steps removed from the initial impulse. I want to allow for the passage of time. I don’t much care if no one ever sees it. I vaguely imagine some time-distant viewer interpreting its layers, like an archaeologist, but I’m not equipped to make immediate connections with people. I am not a performance artist. I keep myself at a distance.

That’s what draws me to this place: its remoteness. It distances one even from oneself. Something about the dark, it creeps into all the cracks and levers apart all the irregular plates that you have grafted together into an identity. You feel yourself breaking up, like an ice-sheet cracking. You experience everything more purely, each sensation concentrated and isolated, from exquisite animal fear to a lunatic joy. 

Whatever happens down there seems to happen to someone else. Whenever I go down to resume work on the Wall I approach it cautiously, curiously, as if it were the work of another hand, a long time ago. A cave painting by a direct ancestor. I am always baffled by signs of other human presence down there – bottles or food or used condoms, smashed lighting or objects moved around. It feels like evidence of time travel or a parallel universe: theoretically possible but so wholly improbable as to make me doubt my own perception. Who the fuck would come down here?

Except me, of course. Except us. 

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.