Tag: ink

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".

Manuscripts, pen on paper. (Each 8"x3.5" approx)

Pages of repeating symbols, like an attempt at meditation, investing something insignificant with meaning. Really I was just trying to test/use up old pens but I found the activity soothing, like reciting a mantra. Tacked-on-as-an-afterthought metaphor: you can refer to women as lesser over and over til it seems true, but it remains total nonsense.

I’m on a feminist kick lately. It’s a combination of what I’ve been reading, what’s been in the news lately*, and personal experience (like yesterday, when I tried to stop a guy ramming his girlfriend’s head against a bus window and whispering poison in her ear, telling her she was worthless).

I’m suddenly full of fervour, like a freshly minted evangelist. And I’ve been trying to think clearly about this late-onset anger – this uncharacteristic impulse towards loud, vocal protest. Is it childish? Is it just a rite of passage, like the newly-out lesbian who gets the dykiest haircut she can manage and covers everything she owns in rainbow stickers in the first flush of pride in her new identity? It passes. Maybe I should keep this to myself til I’ve processed it a bit more. After all, what can I possibly have to say on the subject? Honestly, what do I really know about women, or feminism? What meaningful contribution can I make to further the cause of gender equality right now, other than tell the people around me that I’m a feminist and show them, to the best of my ability, what I think that means?

I don’t want to fall into the trap of acting like I’m the first person ever to think about any of these things. (I’m pretty sure every time a new feminist polemic is published, Germaine Greer just flings her hands up in exasperation, going “You guys, that’s what I’ve been SAYING!”) Maybe if I spend the next 20 years reading and distilling my anger into something crystal clear and precise, I might have some insight to offer. 

So in the meantime, I’m trying to find a more considered, understated and intelligent way to express some of these ideas.

Because that’s what I am, “too tasteful,” as a tutor once sneered.

In this case I think it’s going to mean abstracting the idea of feminism a bit, using a broader or more academic sense of the word gender (as in gendered looking: perspectival, partial) and exploring how position determines perception. The alternative at this point would probably be smearing a canvas with the word “RRAAARRGH” daubed in menstrual blood. I don’t want to be that person. So we’ll see how this works out. 

*There is one point I’d like to make about the media furore surrounding the maid at the centre of the “DSK” rape case in New York. I hate that even though no one is challenging the physical evidence, her credibility as a witness is shot because she apparently lied about some things that were completely unrelated to the case. As if she therefore deserved to be raped, or that there can be no occasion for a trial. Can I just say what in God’s balls? I lied about stealing candy sticks from my brother when I was about six. Did I thereby forfeit my right to my own body, my personhood? Did I just give some misogynistic git a free pass? Every time I tell a lie, a rapist gets his wings? What, in short, the fucking fuck?