Tag: monochrome

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. 

Naif  (Mixed media)

Come to think of it, I’ve done a few in this vein. 

This was an oil painting, but I don’t have a decent photograph of it in its original state. 

This one… well, the kid who modelled is naturally thin but he looks positively emaciated in this painting. I have to take responsibility for that, for exaggerating the tones and manipulating the topography. I just like the way strong light plays on the contours of the human figure and there are generally more interesting shadows to be cast by bones slithering around just under the skin. I know some people find this kind of thing disturbing, and I’d think it most unfortunate if this upsets anyone. It’s never about glamourising thinness, or promoting an ideal of beauty. I’m not interested in social commentary. I do think thin figures communicate a sense of longing, of deficiency – a bony figure in an awkward pose just somehow broadcasts need. See Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, Mikhail Vrubel, Harry Clarke, El Greco and Blue Picasso for precedents. So I wasn’t aiming for much more with this painting than a little emotional resonance and a slightly uncomfortable atmosphere. 

Originally 4 feet by 2 feet, oil & mixed media on board. The skin was acid green and I unexpectedly pioneered a possibly groundbreaking texturing technique when a cloud of mayflies got embedded in the surface when I took the piece outside to varnish it. What you see here is the edited version, manipulated in Photoshop CS2.