Why this, why bother?
I remember during a tutorial at art college a while back, a ‘pure painter’ tutor uttering those rather cruel and devastating words…’why bother?’. I decided to take this as a deliberate and provocative stance to test my mettle in respect to the critical thinking of my work and process.
Yes, that I can answer. My background (be it many moons ago) is IT. I used to work in a project based IT environment, as a business analyst/consultant helping the business deliver their IT solutions. More often than not I was the middle person in-between the techies and the fast paced business professionals so as a result I was used to taking many different perspectives at once. In my work I use to think and breathe from both the aspect of the users and the developers; from the tiny bits of detail (which may have served a very specific business function) to the ‘stand-back’ overall strategic viewpoint of the very senior management in addition to the business and technical infrastructure in which the IT business application sat. I can sense your eyes glazing over…
This may sound exceedingly tedious and completely unrelated to art, but it is relevant to me. The interconnectedness of things, between that which can be achieved through the computer and the hand, the patterns apparent in hardware and software and in both the technical and physical painterly processes that I use, the way in which they sit and operate together, the standing back, multi-perspective viewpoints and the ‘diving right in’ personal interpretation and response. The structured and analytical working alongside the imagination as a dynamic and creative partnership. All of this is thrown into the fray when I make my work.In the words of Descartes ‘I think, therefore I am’ and in the words of me ‘therefore I do’.
Cracking open the imagination
Sometimes in our day to day wanderings, we might come across things that for whatever reason, capture our imagination and stick in our mind. It might remind us of something, humour or intrigue us in some way. I am currently in the process of creating a series of work based on objects I found on a beach in New Zealand quite a few years ago. My father had passed away and I was there for the funeral. He had lived close to Mount Maunganui beach which goes on and on and whenever I visited that part of the world, I like to walk along it for hours, preferably alone.
On this occasion it was winter and the beach was particularly deserted. The wind and the waves had tossed ashore lots of debris and as I was walking along, various things caught my eye. Pieces of driftwood and smatterings of seaweed reminded me of strange alien-like creatures – almost indescribable, a little melancholy at times. I took photos of these and for years now have kept hold of these images, waiting for the time I would actually do something with them. Now is that time.
Here is the first of 3 of these ‘Strange Creatures’. I call it ‘Sea Hen’. I have played with the photo digitally, drawing into it, creating erasure marks to emulate legs. I have also combined it with another photo of mine of some jelly fish – primarily because this ‘thing’ sprung forth from the sea and is caught between 2 worlds – reality and fiction. Then between these two images, I allow paint to meet digital mark, embellishing, emphasising and blending where I see fit. I see this as more than just an exercise, but an adventure, to let my imagination do its thing and play.
Urban Desires
Quite often I work on a number of pieces at the same time. Currently I have a very big painting on the way, but because of various reasons, I can’t currently proceed with it. Normally it’s to do with needing further supplies, or school holidays limiting the time and effort I can devote to it. When it’s like this, I tend to start on much smaller and less pressurised pieces whilst I wait. The ‘Urban Desire’ series is exactly this. Using found bits of wood (courtesy of local skips) and old packaging from supermarkets, I have transferred on to them photographs of urban moments and scenes. The images are meaningful to me in that they are of very normal city type things but where I perceive a sense of grace arising out of the ordinary. They tend to remind me of Oriental flower arranging or a kind of feng shui in which the subjects have a formal quality and composition.
They include a photograph of outside plant shadows against a window. Ironically I saw this in an art gallery and was taken with this scene rather than any of the art at the time. Another is of a café window where a design on its surface is mirrored by a reflection of a tree. Two other pieces are of bits of foliage and plants which had been thrown away in a skip and bin but looking as posed and arranged as can be. Another piece is a very simple and natural display of dead rose heads on a footpath and another of an elaborate flower arrangement within a café/bar scene.
Within all these works I have painted within these images continuing on with my exploration of ebb and flow of the digital and paint. The discarded bases on which these images quietly sit reflect the disposable or temporary nature of the images themselves.
Whilst I seem to have been busy since my last blog, my actual creative output seems to have been pretty scant. I do seem to have been involved in an awful lot of art admin– entering competitions, preparing for a couple of exhibitions and working on a couple of electronic book covers for clients, but nevertheless the painting and digital art I have been doing have produced rather disappointing results.
I continue on with my exploration of the digital mark and paint in combination with surface. ‘Scar’ started off as a transferred collage of a digital montage of mine that went incredibly wrong in the process. I suppose another person might have ripped the canvas off and started again, but I can be particularly stubborn at times and so didn’t want to give up on it. Much of my work stems from the process of just looking and imagining, so whilst working on other things I let ‘Scar’ rest against the wall, so that occasionally certain things would appear to me and give me some sort of idea as to what else I could do with it. I wanted to be true to my playing with surface, paint and digital mark, so it was important I didn’t obliterate the whole thing with paint. So in some parts I tore elements of paper off, so that instead of a digital or painted layering effect, it was in fact a paper layer effect – appearing like strata of rock. It is important to me that the digital image sits along-side with equal importance as the paint, but at the same time, a manifestation of form begin to appear as opposed to be just a sea of colour and pattern.
In addition to these I have played around with some digital drawings (using a tablet and pen) and transferred these to canvases as small collages. Within these I have combined both drawing of ink and paint. The digital images didn’t transfer as well they normally do and I am not quite sure why. The final effect is that they are rather faint on the surface and fade into obscurity compared to the ink and painted marks. I strongly suspect that the colour of the base of the surface didn’t help and also I needed to be bolder and more obvious with my digital drawings in the first instance. However these were good exercises to do and have taught me a thing or two to take forward.
This is the beauty of not having to focus on actual university course-work. At uni, whilst one is definitely encouraged to experiment, make mistakes etc, the reality is that when you are in your final year, you really have to focus on your degree show from quite an early stage. It may not be the same for everyone, but in my case, it certainly minimised my experimentation as I simply didn’t have the time to do this. So whilst creatively I sit within a kind of an abyss, it is a nice place to be currently and allows me to play, explore and critically evaluate my art in a less pressurised way.
I have been continuing my exploration of surface, collage and paint montages. These have been deliberately done rather quickly as I wanted to initially let my instinct take over the creation and merging rather than use an analytical take.
In ‘Strange ways’ I started with torn images from a magazine, focusing on patterns of lines and circles. These I quickly stuck onto a greenish painted surface, going for sense of movement, trying to follow the directional pull of the patterns themselves. Then I sat back and studied the resultant effect. It looked kind of weird, as if another sort of place in a different sort of time. I played with this eerie quality, darkening here, emphasising its strangeness sitting amongst the space.
‘Yellow and marble’ used a similar approach with magazine collage and pattern, although I covered the surface more thoroughly. The roughness of the painted canvas underneath was allowed to show through. I scraped and swirled paint within bits of the collage emulating the pattern and gestures I could see.
In ‘Doorways’ I cut out rectangles from the magazine, all neutral colours. These I pasted upon a roughly painted surface of black and white. The idea was to create portals and avenues through to elsewhere – working with invisible grids and lines to create different dimensions of space. Upon the surface I used ink to paint deviations and squiggles – like bits of loose cotton that have got caught within it. Drips and scratches permeate the canvas and close up you can see the texture and roughness of the collage and surface.
‘Half-light’ started with a deep pink background. I collaged cut out shapes, reminiscent of leaves. I was aiming for something simple and graceful but the initial actual effect just annoyed me – it looked too stark and definite. I found myself finger painting with blues and greens, dots of red and coral, the marks falling down upon the raised surface. This I was happy with, like a tree in the rain.
These paintings or collages – whatever you would like to call them are not meant to be complicated. They are not trying to say something deeply philosophical or be steeped in ‘art-speak’ terminology. They are simply me, responding in the way many of us respond to the world around us. If what is in front of us is familiar in anyway, then we assimilate this into what we already know, recognisable patterns, scenes and places. So a piece of collage, painted gesture or textured surface can speak to most of us– although exactly what is said may be quite different from person to person. Our brains are pretty good at crossing those borders to make sense of things whatever the medium that is used. However if it is new to us and unrecognisable, then we have to get our head around it, and accommodate it – a much harder task, but once done, it is a learnt experience and there for good.
