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August 30, 2004
Searching for significance
It’s hard to see feelings as significant. From the inside what I feel seems nothing unusual – to me, obviously, I’m feeling the feelings. My own feelings can feel insignificant. So it’s hard to value an expression of personal feelings.
It’s easier to look at what others are doing and gain value from them: borrowed significance. But this is clearly not true expression, and results in pictures of tulips or soggy landscapes or [heaven forefend] Scottie dogs in tartan ribbons.
Unless of course Scottie dogs in tartan ribbons are deeply significant in your life – in which case don’t paint: do Crufts.
In 1975 German artist, Joseph Beuys, walked round the edges of a dilapidated room in The Poorhouse, Edinburgh, holding a blackened cooking pot up above his head. This was called ‘the 3 Pots Action’. It meant something to him. Others were left to ruminate on the significance. In 1976 he represented Germany in the Venice Biennale. That’s significance for you.
And that’s it really: it must mean something to you. After that it’s just opportunity and good PR.
Posted by john at 10:10 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 28, 2004
unstuck dancing
Ever seeking to expand my sphere of experience, I’m extending the unstuck project into dance and movement.
It seems a logical progression. I’ve worked for many years drawing and painting dancers, and the recent work with figures and text in becoming unstuck has included projected images which I feel need to be experienced live.
So I’m working on a dance piece to accompany an exhibition of the unstuck paintings. A dancer, painted with text and with text projected onto her, will dance in the dark space of a disused mill floor.
I'll record the piece, digitally, and perhaps increase the layers of text before screening the film in the forthcoming unstuck exhibition.
Now I need a musician - and a dancer, obviously.
Posted by john at 10:14 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 26, 2004
connected
I am connected to the work, to the paint [physically sticky with it at times]. I am connected to the subject. It is something from within me that I don’t understand and find no other tangible way of expressing the feelings, other than painting. I only understand that it is happening and I am doing it.
I paint therefore I am, if you like.
Though it’s hard to remain inside it. That takes great confidence. To let you see what you will in my work. I know no more about it than you. But because it’s come from inside, it’s scary to let you look at it.
There are no text books here, only beliefs
Posted by john at 05:27 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 25, 2004
law 11 appendix I
Paint anger, frustration, confusion, sadness, happiness even, just don’t paint complacency. Paint wild, paint crazy, paint big, paint with bare feet, paint in the rain, just don’t paint complacency.
Paint because you have to, not because you want to. Paint because you need to get something out, because you need to put something down, not because you want to make pictures.
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August 24, 2004
Laws of painting: No 11
Don’t paint complacency, no-one ever got anywhere painting complacency
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August 23, 2004
No model
It takes longer to paint a picture without a model.
With a model I feel a need to paint, I feel there is a requirement to paint. After all that’s why we’re both here.
Without a model I wander about aimlessly [updating the Unstuck Diaries] and generally spending a long time not painting.
I can not paint a still life for days on end. But then why would I want to paint a still life? The French call it nature morte and that’s a better description. I want to paint life, the living, breathing, heart-beating stuff.
But sometimes I have to paint without a model, using photographs and drawings, and it takes longer. Plus there is no heartbeat so it’s much more of a struggle to get life into the painting.
Let alone
the lack of light
bouncing off the skin.
Posted by john at 03:32 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 20, 2004
truth and lies
Too many conscious marks and the piece is flat. Too many chaotic marks and the piece lacks definition. As ever it’s about striking a balance between the two.
The work must just come out, burst forth, in sheer, unstoppable, heart-stopping panic. Then rely on learnt skills and experience to define it.
It must be an impossible-to-resist-the-urge-to-do-it piece. Not a planned-with-HB-pencils-on-white-paper-over-a-cup-of-coffee-and-a-custard-cream piece.
Posted by john at 03:45 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 15, 2004
the fear
The fear of the big blank panel. Staring out clean and empty it dares you to make a mark. TOUCH ME IF YOU DARE! But it’s not too difficult to sneak up on the big blank panel, to splatter it, or outline a figure on it, without too much commitment at this stage.
Then the fear of the first marks. Okay, bypass this one, without even thinking: block out the highlights and shadows, get some paint on, make the first marks a process and the fear goes.
Only to return double! The figure is blocked in and looks – well, okay. IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO DO ANY WORK ON IT – I WILL DEFINITELY WRECK IT. So I fling paint about in the background and work up some contrast around the figure, dark ground then light over it to help the edges of the figure fight for existence on an increasingly chaotic panel.
At some point* in the above session my brush hits the Naples Yellow and drags a bit down into the white and whips it up onto the top of the shoulder, then before you know it I’m into the neck and highlights on the breasts and the belly and then another brush hits the Indian Yellow and veers off towards the Ivory Black, and for a brief exciting moment, with all care thrown to the four winds, I paint fearlessly.
*more often than not in the fifteen minutes before I’ve got to be somewhere else.
Posted by john at 04:49 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 12, 2004
Laws of painting 9 & 10
more in the intriguing series...
No.9 Things don’t look good until they’re done*
No.10 It takes a long time to do.
*Law No.9 is one of the few laws that can also apply to cooking.
Posted by john at 05:53 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
More on the doing of it…
The craft of it is relatively easy to get on with. A sort of practical right/wrong business with its own order and a set of rules all to itself that won't let you down if you follow them.
The it itself isn’t difficult, mainly because it’s non-prescriptive. Doesn’t always occur, but when it does, it is, by its very nature, relatively easy.
It’s the practise of it that’s the hard one. Learning to keep on going in the face of terrifying odds. Constantly doing drawing and painting when every financial and responsible bone in your body screams out for you to stop and take up hairdressing.
Posted by john at 05:41 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
The doing of it…
There’s the craft of it. The skill: choosing the size and proportion of the panel and then making the panel. Preparing surfaces, priming, sanding. The mixing of paints, knowing about transparent pigments, opaque pigments, genuine turpentine, linseed oils, sun thickened oils, drying times and siccatives, fugitive colours.
There’s the practise of it. Drawing the figure regularly, learning how it is, how the muscles and bones are, how the light falls on the surfaces. Learning which colours give what effect.
Then there’s the it itself. When the craft is complete and the skills are at hand, when the practise comes easy then, with the brain suitably distracted and the brushes loaded, then, sometimes, if the wind is in the right direction, then, it happens [so long as it’s not half-day closing obviously].
Posted by john at 05:03 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 09, 2004
In the cellar
That’s where the unstuck work is kept, in the cellar.
Through the old wooden door that isn’t opened much, down the damp untrodden steps, and the flaking lime washed walls, onto the cold stone-flagged floor, past the musty isinglass stained pot, past the broken glass peeling window frame and the rust encrusted grate. Through the dark, cold, thick, frightening air, to the corner where the flagstone is missing and the clear water runs under the house.
There a four year old boy stands on stone looking at the underground stream, thinking thoughts as clear as the water, appearing and disappearing in the breath-catching, naughty you-shouldn’t-be-down-here torch lit corner.
That’s where the unstuck work is. Stacked up in the strange room under the walled up stairs.
Posted by john at 10:47 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 07, 2004
Rembrandt’s colours
Azuriet
Beenderzwart
Bruine Oker
Gele Oker
Kasselse Aarde
Loodtin Geel
Looduit
Malachiet Groen
Ombergebrande
Omber Rouwe
Rode Lak
Rode Oker
Smalt
Vermiljoen
Posted by john at 04:36 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 03, 2004
Standing barefoot
Standing barefoot on a smooth grey rock in the middle of a fast flowing stream she thinks of days of grass and cold water, of the water parting on either side of the rock behind her as it always has and always will.
Posted by john at 10:39 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 02, 2004
The road to involvement
Painting is about being involved.
But not a disconnected, scientific, analytical, oh-look,-it’s-time-for-lunch involvement. No, with a model in the studio and paint on the brushes, it is, for a few hours at a time, a whole life lived by the moment.
It is a connected relationship, beyond science, beyond formality, beyond sexuality and off into that wondrous place, where the muse lies supine: the righthandside of the brain. The alpha-state that, suppressing the longwinded, laborious, labelling of the lefthandside, lets the essence of what is seen and felt flood the body with inspiration and an unstoppable passion to put it down in paint.
And like any altered brain state it takes some getting there. Made all the more difficult by the fact that the lefthandside doesn’t want you there in the first place. Like trying to avoid an alien invasion it constantly changes the signposts so the road is never the same twice, and there are no maps.
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