It turns out that the unknown that was and is still beyond me is currently oil painting. I bought some oil paints over ten years ago, but have been put off by the solvent vapours, and the texture and nature of canvas.
Some time during lockdown I had another go at canvas, using thin acrylic. Something was there, but I just couldn't abandon the lively ink line that had first greeted me back in India in the 80s, which had been insisting on itself ever since. So I had an ink line on canvas, thin paint, but then what? There was nothing better about canvas than ink on paper, and the paint soaked in and I lost my rough brush mark edges.
I tried giving up my inky line...
The problem was my training in line-free tonal drawing. It's magical, what you can do that way, but for some reason I didn't want to rest there. I can do the tonal thing, the life-capture or life-inspired thing, but it's been done, by me and others, a million times, and I just didn't want to go there. So then I tried putting the line on top.
But again, nothing seemed to be gained compared to my usual thin acrylic on paper.
A bit later I decided to 'take myself in hand' and 'really focus on learning about oil paint'. I put myself on a little self-study course, trying to get to grips with layers and solvents and 'fat over lean'. It whispered something to me, but with a spirit now allergic to trying to learn things formally, I stalled, unable to see how to take it forward.
My mind/intention was trying to do what my cultural conditioning told me I was supposed to do (discipline myself to 'learn my scales' before being allowed to play and have fun...), but my spirit wasn't having it. I was soon back to more spirit-guided weirdness, working on paper in response to poems of a composer.
There were already so many issues going on at once. The endlessly vexed question of subject matter, working figuratively but not directly from life. The nature of materials and tools, learning anew with every painting. The challenge of colour. The mystery of a process that continually takes things in directions that don't originate in my conscious mind.
I could have gone on working with the ink line, paper and thin acrylic for the rest of my life and never run out of things to explore. But as soon as something starts to fly, become a little series, it as quickly runs out after a few paintings, because somehow it becomes glib, it becomes repetition, even if every time something is learned anew. As the summer arrived and I was able to open my windows to aerate the smell of solvent and linseed oil, a tiny promise from months ago to try oils again began to insist.
This time I didn't start with little test pieces. I smeared some stuff on two bits of lovely textured paper, and then I just did a big fat doodle in the ink line and acrylic style on a larger piece of canvas pinned to a board. It is all precisely how not to do oil painting, but this is the way I have to do it; in order to simply play, in order to explore rather than feel that I'm following someone else's instructions.
Then I got over my childish rebellion just a little and tried what I imagined to be more measured and proper approach (random subject matter, some Victorian relative photos currently on my living room floor...). Perhaps this is an underpainting?
I'm beginning to understand now that you never have to worry about losing density or richness by being thin, because this is oil paint. It's a sumptuous miracle. All the things I tried to do do make acrylic stay thin but build density without going plastic shiny.... well goddamn, I don't have to work with any of that because this is oil paint. I have woken up in my best dream, even though I have no idea what to do.
There are huge challenges ahead, if I ever get past just trying to work out fat over lean. I don't always want the neat blending that oil facilitates, I've come to like the way that fast-drying acrylic leaves an edge, that can then be worked over. If I give up my line, how will I deliberately transgress the limits that demarcate a form...something I deliberately like to do with my acrylic and ink (which for me has a metaphysical resonance, as well as being an aesthetic choice)? Will a painted line carry the same charge? There will be times when it's going to feel all wrong, when it's no longer fun, when one of these problems will overcome me and leave me feeling helpless.
I don't know the answer to these questions. But perhaps I'll find something that I could never have dreamt of with ink and acrylic, something that I still can't dream of but may discover if I don't lose my courage.
'Art moulds us into the shape it wants us to be and the thing that serves it best...Art doesn't like being told what to do. It doesn't like me getting in the way' (
Nick Cave).
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