Tag: painting

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. 

Untitled (abstract), oil on canvas. 20×35". 

I have sympathy for the Wrong. There’s a place in my heart for people throughout history who’ve stuck to some erroneous theory despite the evidence. Like Charles K. Johnson, President of the Flat Earth Society. Or astronomer Fred Hoyle, who couldn’t accept that the universe was expanding, simply because he hated the idea. He actually coined the phrase “Big Bang”, meaning it to be derisive, but others with different sensibilities thought it evocative and punchy and it stuck.

I’m not sure people generally deserve much credit for getting things ‘right’. What gets attributed to insight seems, more often than not, to be a matter of personal taste. Most atheists are not persuaded by logic so much as the idea of logic: they find it beautiful, in the same way that believers are seduced by the romance of religious faith. Obviously even atheism is a leap of faith. You’re operating on an assumption that you can’t know to be true. (That the universe is always logical, for example.) And that’s alright. 

You’re guided by what seems proper to your personal sense of propriety, of elegance. If your mental image of a particular description of reality isn’t convincing – cathartic, possessing some terrible beauty – then you won’t be able to commit. If you find the concept of a spherical Earth inherently ridiculous and unpleasant, no argument will convince you. If the idea of the universe beginning with a dramatic, messy, asymmetrical explosion strikes you as ungainly and embarrassingly theatrical, you’ll spend your whole life finding excuses not to believe in it. All belief, all choice, comes down to aesthetics. 

But I don’t know where one’s notions of beauty come from. I know my standards of physical beauty are constantly shaped and manipulated by external forces. I know I can teach myself to love certain works of art or certain faces over time. But when it comes to more abstract concepts of beauty, it seems more deeply-rooted, more innate, beyond my power to control.

I suppose truly abstract art is one of the few areas where, as a viewer, you’re encouraged to be irrational. You can indulge in your own unfounded prejudices because the artist isn’t making any pre-emptive excuses by giving you certain things to think about. There are no calls on your attention, nothing to mediate your instinctive feeling, nothing to temper your hate or cool your ardour – no story for you to consider, no narrative, no intellectual subtext. You either like what you see or you don’t. And sometimes it is an enormous relief to just look at a painting and say with confidence, “That is a total load of fucking cock." 

That’s what’s scary about making abstract art. Your last line of defence – the artist’s intent – is down. If people don’t like it, you can’t pretend they just don’t get it. I’m getting over that fear. In the past, I’ve always felt apologetic about making paintings that have nothing to say for themselves, like I was pulling a stunt of some sort. If people liked it, I’d feel guilty, like I was getting away with some scam. But I’m over it. I liked making it, I still like it enough not to paint over it, call it a win. 

I’ve left my reclusive hideaway in the midlands but I still have several landscape-themed paintings, like the one above, that need more work. It remains to be seen whether I’ll ever finish them. It’s surprisingly difficult to change location and keep momentum. 

I’m also sick at the moment and have not the slightest interest in painting anything at all. I’m on lots of medication which is dulling my senses and limiting my movements, and even the keenest artist’s eye might not find much inspiration in charting the colours of the phlegm spectrum. 

Work in progress, oil on canvas, 30×24.5".