Galleries

Two major reasons I have not been getting much painting done are:

1) very distracted by the sea. 

2) Despite zero experience in the maintenance and repair of bicycles, let alone decrepit folding bikes dating from the seventies, I’ve been messing around with the rusty piece of much-loved junk pictured above. Full title Viscount Trusty Delta, informally known as Sexybike. 

Sony DSC-HX1, colours heightened in Photoshop CS2. 

SO. hello. 

Since the move, I have been really, really unfocused. I have no idea what I’m doing. It’s…fine, actually. It’s great. I am not worrying about the future, or dwelling on things that don’t matter, or making any plans whatsoever beyond the level of “maybe I will buy a nice pencil today”. My sleep patterns are all over the place, I am probably drinking too much and I think I have forgotten how to read but that is okay. For now. 

Since my attention span is shot, I am not committing to any large-scale or long-term painting projects just now. Instead, in the spirit of spontaneity, I’ve been messing about with low-fi, quick & dirty, one-off print techniques – monoprint/monotype, frottage, collagraph, and what-have-you.

Untitled prints, water-based ink on various papers.

So, I stayed up too late one night trying to fix this painting and ended up slathering most of it in a thin layer of Prussian blue. The result struck me with the force of an epiphany and I even wrote a note to myself that read “WHEN IN DOUBT BLUE” and pinned it up in the studio with a flourish. Next day I came back in and saw this. Hahaha what the hell have I been doing? 

So I took the only logical course of action. I abandoned the painting and moved house.

This painting. This goddamn painting. It is breaking my heart. I started the wretched thing back in April of this year. It is now November. I am about ready to claw my own face off. 

I mean, lookit the thing. Jiminy Christmas.

I am posting it here in an attempt to see it differently, out of the context of the studio, with fresh eyes. (Oil on linen, most definitely not completed.)

Another abstract piece I’ve been working on in recent weeks. It’s possible this blitz of colour is partly a reaction to the onset of winter. I’m not ready to submit. The wildflowers are gone, the leaves are vanishing and it’s too goddamn dark. 

This painting isn’t quite finished and I think there’s something sinister about it…a sort of shadow hanging in the centre like an ill omen. I’m not sure if I should fix it. 

Work in progress, oil on linen, 36 x 55".

Here’s how that abstract piece is turning out. Still some tweaking needed, but probably of the subtle type that will make no discernible difference to anyone but me. 

Effaced (working title) Oil on linen, 34.5 x 39.5". 

In between semi-abstract landscape paintings that I despair of ever finishing, I’ve been trying to remember how to draw. Focusing on hands, wrists & elbows. 

Pencil sketches on paper (detail). 

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).