Tag: figure

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.

In line with the previous post about destruction being an integral part of the painting process, I’ve decided to assemble a visual diary of a failed painting I did a couple of years ago. (I take photos of everything.)

1. Loose colour in the background, figure drawn in (something? charcoal?) and then redrawn with liquid latex. 

2. Decide some geometry will liven this party up, put a wash of thin paint over masking tape to create a grid. 

3. Start filling in some shading and detail on the figure, still not sure what I’m doing with that grid. 

4. Turn grid into Matrix-y columns of tiny squares, start sticking in tiny images cut out of newspapers etc. 

5. Test out possible colour combinations/ compositional tweaks in Photoshop, but nothing I do is working. 

6. Give up on the figure entirely, I hate it. Decide this painting is destined for abstraction, paint over everything in stripes of white and purple. 

I’m actually not sure where this painting is now; I think I might have painted over it completely with white and left it in a friend’s flat. If I recall correctly, it’s on their mantelpiece behind some beercans and a portrait of Jessica Fletcher from Murder She Wrote. 

Work in progress; oil on canvas, 32"x40".

I thought I might as well acknowledge that I spend almost as much time ruining paintings as I do making them. It would be nice to romanticise the artist as some sort of Siva-like being embodying both creation and destruction, but really any painter is really just an entity of pure ego. I paint over things because they don’t live up to the standards I imagine myself capable of. I think they don’t represent what I can do. Other things I don’t paint over, because I imagine they have some quality that deserves protection. Alright, maybe that doesn’t actually look like a leg, per se, if one is being pedantic, but perhaps it has some intangible beauty that I, irrationally, want to preserve. 

The painting above is a failed portrait. I haven’t totally given up on it, but nor have I done any real work on it in several years. It was actually varnished and hung in an exhibition, and then I gave it away because it was too flawed to sell. And then I stole it back about a year later, because I was too embarrassed to leave it as it was. I literally took it off someone’s wall and carried it home. I stripped off the varnish and rubbed out the parts that were most offensive and now it’s been sitting my studio for months while I try to figure out how to fix it. The only part I really like are the legs. I’m really proud of those knees. I don’t know why. Do they look like knees? No. They do not. But there’s something satisfying about the colours, the shadows, the general knobblyness. They’re mighty knees. I had an excellent model, a bony adolescent boy, mid growth-spurt. He recently had to go to a physiotherapist because of trouble with those marvellous knees. It turned out he had extremely tight hamstrings because his legs were growing faster than his muscles. Literally, his bones were growing too fast for his flesh to catch up. 

That’s neither here nor there, really, except that sometimes I feel that way about painting. In some parts of this picture, I got way ahead of myself, perhaps those knees were a fluke and it’s only after all this time that I’m technically capable of bringing the rest of the piece up to the same standard. We’ll find out, I suppose. 

You can get a really warped idea of what women are like from magazines. No one I know is anything like the type of woman that magazines – men’s or women’s -expect women to be or aspire to. I don’t know why that is or what that means.

There are lots of artists (from Artemisia Gentileschi to Sarah Lucas) who have made a point of messing around with the way women are popularly presented and perceived. I’m not sure I have much to contribute to that conversation but here are some drawings I made mostly based on photoshoots from fashion magazines. I’ve mixed feelings about these sorts of images. On the one hand, they’re just beautiful illusions, meant to be enjoyed and disposed of. On the other, women are not.

Like most of my generation, I’m tired of these stupid battles for equality (of gender, race, culture, sexuality) and feel like they should have been won years ago, so I’m seriously losing patience with anything that might be holding us back. Like these tiresome, vapid, slick, ubiquitous images that dehumanise and objectify women for no good reason. (You don’t have to make anyone feel inadequate just to sell clothes. People need clothes.)

Then again, I don’t know which is actually worse, the hyper-sexualised, etiolated, airbrushed girls in the glossies, or the sour, harrowed-looking creatures that inhabit those trashy “True Life” rags with headlines like “Psychic Goldfish Cured My Cancer” or “I Married a Wall”. It’s a pity there doesn’t seem to be a middle ground. Where are all the real girls? 

Pencil sketches + colour added in Photoshop. 

These two were specifically made for the “Queer as Political” exhibition currently running at The Other Place in Cork city. Til now, I’ve really never made explicitly political work, but for once I have something I want to say out loud.

“Corrective rape” is the nauseating term given to the targeted rape of lesbians by men who seek to punish those women for their sexuality. It is currently rife in South Africa, despite a progressive legal constitution that even permits same-sex marriage. Noxolo Nogwaza (24) and Eudy Simelane (31) were each gang-raped, mutilated, stabbed and beaten to death for being gay and speaking openly in defence of gay rights. There have been many others.

Irish society, meanwhile, is comparatively liberal but still unequal. Women and lesbians are still taught the message that their bodies are not their own; that their desires and choices are not valid unless they conform to restrictive notions of femininity. I’m struggling to find a way to speak coherently about the misogynistic, homophobic influences that still permeate our supposedly liberal society but the idea behind these two paintings was to express this basic message: that if you think casual sexism or anti-gay slurs are harmless, you’re just not thinking. Read about what happens when you take this attitude to its logical extreme and consider whether you mind that you’re a part of the problem.

Correction 1 (Double Portrait) and Correction 2: Both pieces watercolour/mixed media on paper, 16×20".

For more information about the deaths of Noxolo and Eudy, try here and here.