A New Search For Figuration

Over a week in, and the vast space has been shape-shifting and swallowing all and any work I make. My residency goals have been revised three times already, because I’m frankly so overwhelmed by the open-ended possibilities of this month that my mind is going non-stop even though I’m telling myself the priority is to make and experiment, not think.

My current self-imposed rules are

1. Follow every whim to try out new materials or ideas
2. maintain openness and receptivity to every artistic possibility
3. avoid comfort zones at all cost

The only problem with such a loose set of objectives is that I feel I’m dropping into dilettante mode. Last week, I was clear in my mind that I wanted to “exploit the recent freedom of my non-objective painting in more figurative work”. I would forget about conceptualising and seeking to understand, and would just focus on the human form as the paradigmatic mode of human expression. But painting figures non-stop has inexorably led me back to underlying concerns about society in general, and suddenly I’m back in the narrative pond feeling I’m about to drown.

And I’m overcome by a desire to model: puppet figures, a bas relief and the early stages of a papier mâché figure are strewn amidst the painting materials. I’m flitting across the vast floor area with so many projects on the go that I frequently end up on the other side resuming the making of something I hadn’t planned to do when I set off 10 seconds earlier.

I literally have no idea from one hour to the next where things are going.

But on the upside, there’s a lot of work emerging, and still 2 1/2 weeks to make something of it.

A couple of days in, and the excitement and anticipation is quickly buried under a layer of an anxious sense of vulnerability and raw exposure.

My priority this first week is to leave aside all thoughts of underlying conceptual concerns and just focus on the materials and the human form. And as soon as I decide this, I’m seized by a need to retreat to non-objective work. My safety zone of the last 8 months. I don’t, of course, go back there. Whilst this residency is about instinct and intuition, I recognise a tendency to confuse habit with instinct.

I’m plagued too by the need to rationalise and justify painting the human form in a contemporary art practice today. In one sense, the exploration of humanity through the figure is such a universal and timeless artistic preoccupation that it shouldn’t be necessary. But I need my own personal justification.

And then there are the innumerable clichés and traps of figure painting which I’ve conveniently partly sidestepped in recent years but which are unavoidable now.

Hence the anxious vulnerability as I stand in my vast new workspace and survey the bitty random pieces of work marking my settling in.