Starting to find time for the studio work again. I have been playing in the sketchbook and I have primed two new boards. They are half the size of the previous ones. I hope to be half as precious and controlled. I will be working from photographs. I’m slowly questioning why I am painting from photographs, and why I shouldn’t. I’m not sure if these questions are mine, or if I’m just getting paranoid by a traditionalist view. “Why not just exhibit the photograph?” When I discuss with contemporaries they don’t seem concerned.
Instead of answering the reasons for working from photographs I find myself answering why painting is my current medium. Why art at all.
It’s about the physical application of paint. I may also mean the arrangement of paint. The psychology of this act, not just the craftsmanship. The smell of linseed oil. Colour. Being alone in a studio. The dedication of time. Starting with individual elements, tubes of paint, an idea, tools and a surface. Transformation of a surface. A visual, unspoken conversation. The unspoken. Signifiers, transference, the signified. Blah blah blah.
Here is a better and different answer regarding the role of painting from the painter Simon Willems (2010) taken from an article in Elephant [1]:
This is tricky. One has to start from the premise of painting as a completely outmoded activity. Yet it is important to register that outmoded does not necessarily mean defunct, and that it has a role and a purpose here. What this creates is vulnerability, all the more critical and heightened by the ‘progressive’ relevance of everything else, to which I feel it is wholly interdependent. I like its outmoded vulnerability. One does not sit down cross-legged and devise strategies for the work or its role. Essentially you’re just aware of how it configures in the grander scheme of things. (Willems 2010, p. 108)
[1] WILLEMS, S. 2010. Stormtrooper Mourning The Loss of His Mother. Elephant, Summer, (3), pp.104-109.
