There are occasions when I ‘paint’ with a sense of the perverse. Deliberately provoking an argument, I prod and poke paint and defy it to become a painting. I seem to want to paint so badly that something purposeful might arise, this art thing somehow there despite my doing my best to prove that it isn’t, painting sustained by feelings of wilfully pleasureable annoyance. There is something deeply childish about it all, like making a mess in order to attract attention, something Freudian in the smearing of paint. ( This a both confession and description? ) Usually I get to a point where I am ground down by my annoyance and I bin the work. But despite the anxieties of it, it still LOOKS like something, has an appearance, maybe a personality, where its connection with stuff called art begins to crystallise along the edges. My stuff doesn’t mean anything other than what it looks like. I dislike the basic designy art class notion of ‘mark-making’ but if I’m not careful, or more to the point, if I become too ‘careful’ that’s what will be the outcome – designy stuff. And paradoxically, all I am doing is making marks? But I am really not doing that. I am marking, figuring and disfiguring, a surface . That is why ‘mark-making’ is an academic exercise, whilst marking a surface is an engagement with something. To paint is to walk a tightrope where the superficially similar in terms of acts disguises deep differences of motivation and meaning; I can stand before a work that I like and watch as it metamorphoses into a nice design for a rug.
