I’ve been working on about 8 things at the same time, which is really not very satisfying. It seems to take forever to finish anything, not least because every canvas I touch lately seems to go through about 6 incarnations before it approaches completion. It’s as if they’re going through some maddening Buddhist cycle of rebirth, dying an ignominious death over and over, while I have to remind myself not to get attached. 

Above, for example, is a stalled portrait that is now being swallowed up by abstraction. I felt awfully guilty about this at first, as if I was wronging the model somehow by painting over her. Then I decided I was nothing if not lord and master of my own domain, and I was not going to allow myself to feel guilty about a failed painting festering in the corner of the studio. Now she’s being eaten by these little blades of colour and I’m a lot more optimistic about the direction the work is going. Still not enlightened, but maybe a step closer. 

Oil on linen (detail).

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. 

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". 

A work in progress – oil & oil pastel on canvas, 30×24". 

This is a small waterfall I discovered amidst the woods in the Slieve Bloom mountains, in Co. Offaly. I don’t know how successful my efforts at landscape are. I think a painting should say more than “here’s this thing I saw.” But I don’t know if these do. I’m finding it hard to articulate what it feels like to be here, alive in the world, and looking at Stuff. It feels good. 

A ridiculously large (6-foot) oil painting of some rocks, mainly. Still a work in progress and will remain so for the foreseeable future. The problem with working on a scale like this is that you can spend five solid hours working on it, step back, and it will not appear to have made the slightest damn difference.