Tag: painting

Another work in progress.

I’ve got seven…eight? paintings on the go just now and I don’t know what I’m doing with any of them. I’ve been trying to take a more instinctive approach and just respond intuitively to accidents and colours and textures but even saying that makes me gag a little because it sounds both indefensibly frivolous and revoltingly self-indulgent. My art education instilled in me the idea that painting is a Serious Business. I still feel like I have to justify every decision I make, even if only to myself. If anyone actually called me out on any of my aesthetic choices or demanded to know how the form supported the content or questioned my use of oil paint over, say, neon or sound or resin, I would think they were a colossal twat. But I would still have a defence. Til now, anyway. 

With these abstracts, I have no plan. No theme. No specific emotion I’m trying to evoke, no particular experience I’m trying to process, other than just being alive, and they’re not friggin’ working. 

Well then. Time to declare myself.

Gonna get drunk and write my manifesto.

It’s ok everyone, I am going to save painting. Stand back, I am ablaze with purpose. 

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.