Work in progress. (Detail.)
Oil on panel, 30.5 x 30.5cm.
Tag: work in progress
Work in progress. (Tentatively calling these the Archaeology series.)
I do still make oil paintings. It’s just an exceedingly slow process.
Oil on panel, 61 x 91.5cm.
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.
Work in progress.
No idea. No idea what’s happening here.
A painting-to-be. Pencil sketch on gesso’d board, so far.
Edit: slightly cleaner image.
Detail from a figure study. (Oil on paper.)
Another detail from the same work-in-progress.
These are just the bits I like. The rest is a shambles.
Another detail from a piece I’m working on. (Oil on paper.)
Detail of a work-in-progress.
I am trying to paint my way out of a slump.
Another unfinished figure study, ca. 2008. Oil on hardboard panel.