Still maybe unfinished or should it be incomplete? I decided to make ‘marks’ on this referring back to stuff from the past, little echoes of Abstract Expressionism. I told myself that I would follow my inclinations, do what I felt I would do and if it turned out to be a nice piece of visual pot-pourri, or even some of that Garden Centre scented woodchip and dead flowers stuff in a wooden bowl then so be it. Placing ‘marks’ on a surface is just a compositional exercise – that the marks have ‘meaning’ is unavoidable, some describable, others, perhaps the most powerful, just beyond the reach of words. Meaning in marks maybe relies too much upon a conventional sense of literal meaning, whereas the visual is to do with the a kind of gravitational attraction. It is too a function of personality to be concerned about such issues. As with the hypochondriac, the fear of some chronic artistic disease may be debilitating in itself. Monkey-typerwriter syndrome is a worry. ‘I do this and then I do this and this dribbles down here and produces this effect.’ Amongst all the monkeys with all the typewriters, some of us will develop a disposition for certain keys and rhythms, and do nice things.
The experience of the nice is like experience in general, ordered in our schemes of things by the processes of taste. Reading a work and experiencing it are neither the same thing nor mutually exclusive. I went to the Towner recently (New Eyes, work from the Towner collection curated by six artists from Bluemonkeynet ) and was shocked by my experience of some of the work- colour field stuff , John Hoyland and others whose names of course escape me just as I need them. A sense of relief to just be there with it, stuff of the ‘my six year old could do that’ kind. How lovely to be such a six-year-old. Perhaps it is a matter of choosing your guns and sticking to them? But which gun? Some of this one is nice.
My blogging has all but disappeared. I have a strange feeling of losing all energy and motivation, in and out of a painter’s limbo. This painting is a reflection of that state. Whenever I don’t know what to do, I tend to MAKE DOTS. (I just hit the caps button by mistake and ‘make dots’ emerged as ‘MAKE DOTS.’ And it seemed appropriate.) That’s what I do when I am painting. I do something unintentionally that acts as a suggestion. Dots seem to have a life, they buzz and colour comes alive. Repetition is the essence of limbo. It leads to weariness and then a kind of becalmed exhaustion. I think I might be a Modernist. It worries me. This picture will be/is titled, ‘Who’s a Pretty Boy Then?’ But the dead creature doesn’t speak, rather, ‘Who Was a Pretty Boy Then?’ I have the feeling that the dots and colour are somehow restorative of the life of the bird, as painting hopefully restores life to the painter. I have a self-destruct switch which drifts into sight sometimes. I can see it now. It controls my feelings of ambivalence to what I am doing – on-off-on-off. I place a colour, love it immediately and then recoil from its shallow prettiness. What I do is what I am. The painting looks at me, is an accusation. If it can somehow ‘work’ the accusation is refuted, one truth deflected by another. But what nonsense it all seems as the switch flicks on and off.
Drawing from memory as Jo Farnell suggested. More than the two weeks have passed. The difference is considerable, between this and the first drawing. The rather wooden reorganisation of shapes and disproportionate sizes of body parts that is apparent is like a child’s schematic drawing without the charm, in which knowing what is there is prior to seeing what is there, despite it being in front of the child. This is a kind of return to that but with adult marks. Memories have mixed and boundaries blurred. There is some pigeon DNA! I found that I had to begin drawing to free up, those memories that were accessible, and then visual and tactile memory worked together. A line on the paper prompted a mental image and so on. There is a lot, and much more than I thought, that was invented. I was unsure sometimes whether I was inventing or remembering. There is still a recognisable pheasantiness about this? But whether real pheasants would accept it as one of their own is questionable.
In the Kaleidoscope gallery in Sevenoaks, the audio work which is part of ‘Beta 2.0’ was not functioning. On the wall a rectangular wooden panel about 4in x 5, from which exited a cable to a set of headphones. Problem soon solved by a librarian, and I set to, to listen to the work, ‘Lighthouse Relay’. As sometimes happens, via the corner of my eye, a distraction intervened. A small picture hook and below it to its right, a small piece of blu-tack. They had been the support for a wooden panel which held the audio player. Unintended art, unintentionally exposed by the librarian. Like plants and small creatures that find their places in cracks and crevices, or force their way to the light seemingly against the odds, the hook and blu-tack objects made something of themselves. On the one hand the hardness of the hook, pinned uncompromisingly to the wall and on the other, the blu-tack clinging apprehensively below. And the distance between. There was sadness in that distance, and their waiting, their smallness on the wall. The hook in its maleness seemed to be keeping up a pretence, the blu-tack in its apparent softness and vulnerability female but without overt femininity. This art was embarrassed to find itself in such exalted company. It seemed like Masaccio’s Adam and Eve to want to cover itself as it was exposed to the view of artworks many thousands of times its size. And yet it seemed to have much in common with the intended art, in that it seemed to have intention within it. And in its vulnerability it craved the relief of recognition. Having listened to the audiowork I replaced the wooden panel and the tension lifted.
‘So What?’was playing in the background whilst I was working on this. The question, like the music, is insistent. I placed the words next to the bird, looking back at me.
