Grounding metaphysical expansion

 

The first painting of 2024. I don't know what to make of it, as usual. Mainly I'm just glad it's here.

I never wanted to have a style. As soon as something looks like it might be repeating itself to some kind of formula, I get uncomfortable. Lots of people seem to find 'the thing they do' and then go on repeating some version of it, probably for many different reasons, one of which might be that it's just a relief not to have to face an empty page every time and wonder what to do. I can also see how a narrowing down, focussing in upon a particular investigation is its own kind of exploration and delight.

For me though this begins to feel like creative atrophy. If it starts to happen I feel I'm no longer simply providing conditions for emergence; no longer creating a space to be surprised in.  I'm being tempted to stay with something not entirely unsatisfying, perhaps to give my nervous system a break from the feeling of constantly putting one foot out in front of me off the edge of my cliff.

Right now I don't want to worry about these long landscapes being in danger of becoming safe or repetitious. Is it just the repetition of a slightly unusual format? Perhaps I think  sameness is appearing because of this format, but that's surely only because it's non-standard; who complains about the sameness of the A size proportions of repeating landscape or portrait formats?

I like the long landscape format because it feels different and strange, and also because it stretches my plants and birds and artefacts potentially into some kind of narrative, though whatever story it might tell is private to the mind of the viewer. I like that compared to the space in the more conventional format, which for me can sometimes be almost overwhelming. Like in the image below.... I'm unnerved by the way this image bypasses space, time and gravity; it throws me into a metaphysical space beyond the normal dimensions/limits which I need to ground my experience and my imagination.

I shared a quote on fb recently about ancient Chinese painters seeing artists' studios as a 'places of applied philosophy'. This seems to be working itself out through me whether I want it to or not, so for now I'm going to stick with my mythical landscapes, not least because they're being pretty insistent. Like I've said before, I just take dictation.

Just experimenting all year long

 

2023 has turned out to be year of experimentation.  Hardly any intended paintings. Sketchbooks, A4 colour tests, a brief return to Indian sculpture, Posca pens, departing from my favourite palettes, taking risks with as much as I could. 

I got a couple of images that interested me in terms of line or colour from the return to the Indian sculptures:

but  that didn't last long. I realised that I was just destroying the beauty that had always captivated me and was not really succeeding in taking them anywhere new.

Then there were a couple of paintings that completed some personal work, making that a private trilogy.

Posca pens...

And then some oil painting experiments...

Finally I landed on the Pith sketchbook in a landscape format, that when I worked over both pages became a kind of long narrative, like an Indian storytelling scroll.

Strangely, and somewhat accidentally, I ended up making some paintings, though I didn't know I was doing so at the time. The best way.

Storylandscapes 2023 video

The human prism

 

I'm interested in visual responses to the world which clearly show that they've passed through a human. The opposite of realism, certainly of hyper-realism.

There is no human who looks like this:

Or like this:

And that's not the point of such images. They channel ideas, feelings, energies, meanings.

Something that humans often seem to do when they process the world is to regularise things. Despite the fact that plants, animals and humans in the actual world are never symmetrical or evenly proportioned, humans often like to make them so. There are no repeating patterns in nature. If you look at a sea shell or a zebra, you'll see that though there's a basic idea that may repeat itself, the way that the repeat emerges is always in some way unique to itself, even as part of a pattern.

Though there may be mathematical rules that provide constraints and generate a type, the actual emergence into the world of the shapes of a general pattern all vary from each other in small ways.

Humans take this in, and seem to like to play with tidying it up into regularity.  I find the result of this tidying up process, which shows me that the rose passed through a living human, far more interesting than images that attempt to reproduce the irregular variations of the living original.

The idea, or feel, of a tree, rather than a representation of its actual form...

Having spent the last year or so trawling Indian, Assyrian and Egyptian reliefs and paintings for images that create the feel of plants rather than their exact forms, I've just recently remembered the wonderful craziness of mid-century design.

Human was here, a responding human. 

Expressing or responding?

I often come across the idea that 'real artists' are 'so talented' that they can just draw stuff, like, brilliantly. It's there within them, they were born with that capacity. There's a closely linked idea that what artists make comes from some secret place of genius within them; some source of originality and differentness that's not given to ordinary people. 

As a basically unschooled person, I absorbed this idea from the culture around me, unconsciously. I knew I wanted to draw and paint, but when I got to St Martins School of Art in the late 70s, I was told that drawing from life was reactionary, old hat, conventional, stuck in the past. So I dutifully made my way to the abstract room, and lined my 18 year old self up with a bunch of other youthful furrowed brows, working studiously on canvases that had to be a minimum of six foot wide. I waited for the stuff to start pouring from me, like it was supposed to. Didnae happen. I decided that if something was supposed to pour out of me, perhaps first it needed to pour into me, arranged a year off, and went off to Oman to become a disc jockey. Travelled the length of India by train, dropped in to Burma, sweated in Hong Kong, visited the art treasures of China in Taipei. In fact, the pouring in lasted for the next thirty years, and even when I properly started painting again my unconscious still had to trick me to get me past the idea that when the time was right the pouring out would simply just begin.

What I didn't know then was that, in fact, if you go into pretty much any artist's studio, you will see images that didn't come from them at all, all over their walls; torn off, cut out random images; photos and postcards; images made by old masters, designers, other artists. No-one ever explained to me that artists work, and they feed. They draw and paint and copy and design, experiment and practice, for years and decades (in fact anyone could do this, but most people simply don't, and then they complain that their drawing 'looks like a six year old's'....). Artists feed off colours and textures and shapes in the world, including the work of other artists, past and present. As Austin Kleon puts it, they steal; voraciously, from everywhere. They notice what they're drawn to, they collect, and then they respond.

    'You only speak because you want to react to something you've heard. The idea of an actor going away to their room and rehearsing something alone is an absolute nonsense to me. What you have to say is completely incidental. All I want to see from the actor is the intensity and accuracy of their listening. And then what you have to say will be automatic and then it will become free and alive. And then you can work on it and shape it and talk about it. But the basic kind of engine to it is how accurate is  your listening. And how alive are you to your fellow actors and how accurate your response, and how bold.'

Alan Rickman, interview on Instagram

Sometimes, my inherited cultural voices start to whisper 'But aren't you just being derivative? Why are you using the work of ancient artists in your paintings, why are you just copying stuff, instead of giving us your own original ideas?'

I'll tell you why. Because I'm having a conversation. I'm not interested in 'expressing myself, or creating a style, or working out what people might want to have on their walls. I'm always on the lookout for someone to have a visual conversation with, whether that someone be the human who made a symbolic object in 3,000 BC, or a 1950s designer abstracting plants in their own unique way.

Working with the world, as it presents itself to me.

Moving slowly, thick undergrowth

 

Eventually, at the deliciously unhurried pace that oils not only allow but insist upon, I finished the first series of tiny oil experiments.

The richness of pigment in oil astonishes me. A thin layer of thinned down oil paint glows. When you put another layer on later, the glow gets deeper. When you put on a layer of a different colour, the optical mixing is breathtaking.

And now for the second series of tiny experimental paintings, accompanied by one slightly larger.

There have been a number of technical problems with finding the right mix of black stuff to create the right kind of black line. The linen paper drags at the folded pen nib, the folded nib clogs up with the acrylic/gesso mix. The oil layers make a shine that the gesso removes when on paper. 

All of this subtly affects the quality of the line, which has to be drawn more slowly. I can't sweep at speed like before. Forms disobey my hand, blobs arrive. The energetics of the whole painting change. 

The slowness is ecstatic.

Cycling quietly through the brick wall

 

I wrote a post recently about my decision to have another attempt at seeing if I could learn to use oil paint in a way that worked for what I'm trying to do. I posted my messy smears as a protest against future frustrations, hoping it would help me to not get precious about whatever happened, and to try to help me to keep going through the disappointments that had ended up against brick walls in previous attempts over the years.

To my surprise, the walls have not really appeared so far, and I feel I'm starting to feel the simple rewards of not giving up. Any of it. Perhaps I needed to do a great deal of experimenting and learning about colour with acrylic first. The acrylic painting taught me that I loved thin paint and layers, and that acrylic could be used in this way. It let me hang on to my inky black line, and eventually it taught me that I didn't want to stay within lines of any kind. It let me learn a way of playing with figuration that was not tonal realism, and it helped me to learn about a process that wanted to be free to be itself, unhindered by my thoughts and desires and intentions.

One of the things that has facilitated what feels like a tiny, quiet leap forward has been the discovery of Seawhite's linen-textured oil painting paper. It's a most beautiful surface, like a fine white linen, but it lets you draw with ink and behaves mainly like paper. 

I was also helped through the maze of 'fat over lean' by a painter friend who explained that all the vague instructions about this online seemed to have been missing one key point; that whatever mix of medium/solvent/oil you use, you can always thin this down further with solvent. Liberation (at least until someone tells me why it's not a good idea to do this...).

The two little paintings above have had the most layers and time. The ones below are in various states of undress.

Exploring different ways of going over the line, and different ways of letting one colour meet another...

Smudgy softness, thin paint and solvent...

The same thin paint, a little less smudgy, some brushstroke edges...

Bolder and denser colour in the first layer, with more defined paint edges (that are going more obviously over the edge of the form...).

Writing this here to keep track of myself.

Today I'm studying how to make birds

 

I quite often read people on facebook berating themselves for having a mind that wanders, for starting one thing and ending up doing another. They've perhaps internalised a cultural idea that we're supposed to be 'keeping focussed'; finding our path and then setting about carving it deeper. Deciding what our art is about and sticking to that. Learning skills that will help us achieve our goals.

This is the opposite of what a creative process is for me. I try to attend to an allowing that will gently peel me off any ideas I might have about what I'm supposed to be doing. I welcome the arrival of an unexpected idea, or finding myself pursuing something that I had no idea was waiting to be explored. Something knows. If I shut up and follow, a deeper part of me which feels the world without thought or words always knows where to go next.

Today I'm studying how to make birds.