Death List

I was rereading the last chapter of Cynthia Freeland's But Is It Art? It was one of the essays i was given during my art degree. It talks about art in a digital age, she refers to the internet and television in relation to the writings of Walter Benjamin, Marshall McLuhan and Jean Baudrillard. Now i can't help thinking of my own work, and that since i started uploading all my paintings on to the internet, things have changed.

My paintings nowadays never really seem to reach a final conclusion, as most of them are painted over somewhere down the line. After i get a painting to a certain standard to which i'm happy, i take a photo and upload it to facebook. A couple of weeks goes by and i'll live with this painting and start to notice things about it which aren't quite right, so i'll work on it some more, usually altering it quite considerably, and then take another photo and upload that to facebook. And will continue altering it until i'm happy with it, ending up with an array of photographs in different stages, which to anybody looking is not one work, but 3 or 4 different works.

You see, people only really come into contact with my work via the internet, where i have 100s of photos of my paintings, hardly any of which are finished, but in reality there's only about 50 canvases that just keep on being reused. Once upon a time to see a painting you'd have to go and 'see' the painting, if you knew the artist you might get to see it in the studio, being worked on. But for the general public it would usually be in exhibitions, the works would be 'finished' and the hanging of the works would be considered. Of course printing meant that artists, like Hogarth would make prints of the paintings (or paintings from the prints) and would be able to circulate an idea of what the work was. Then photography exposed painting a little bit more, you wouldn't actually have to go to Italy to see the Sistine Chapel. Television programmes on art zoomed in to the painting, had soothing voiceovers telling you what to look for, and music to create a particular atmosphere. But the internet just took it that little bit further.

Cynthia Freeland talks about the aura that surrounds a work, that Walter Benjamin thought the 'mechanical reproduction' of a work took away this aura, distancing the viewer from the painting in a sort mimicry of Brecht's Alienation Effect, allowing us to see a work as a whole, with thought, without being sucked in emotionally. Freeland wasn't so sure about this, and you can probably see why with the television example above. With the amount of photographs that can be viewed in high definition on the internet, the examination these amount of works are placed under, the result being that instead of a distancing, the examination brings no answers. We can look at the Mona Lisa under a microscope and there will be no answers, no answers causes ambiguity, ambiguity encourages us to look at a work in a religious, almost sacred way. And... there's that damn 'aura' again.

But, what the internet does, it exposes the process of a painting. It gives the painting a sort of social life, allows us to x-ray it without us having to create those beautiful x-ray images of paintings (which according to... me! is reminiscent of the Turin Shroud, encouraging this 'sacred' idea). No, imagine Leonardo Da Vinci was on facebook, updating his status, twittering his latest inventions, wasting time on tetris, poking Michelangelo (probably wouldn't need facebook to do a bit of male poking though) And every now and then he'd upload an unfinished image of ML, someone would 'like' it, someone would comment on it, "not bad, not your best work", or "she's cute, who is she?"

Apparently he started working on it in 1503, finishing it in 1519, the year he died. And imagine, throughout those 16 years he'd occasionally upload another unfinished image, until at the end of his life there would be a whole array of images of this Mona Lisa in various stages.. What would you think, which would be the more interesting? The real, single piece of work, hanging somewhere behind a bullet proof screen and hundreds of people queuing up to see it. Or a facebook photo album filled with it in different stages, with comments of friends, patrons, Leonardo himself, the likes, the adverts at the side of the pages, the other, failed attempts at paintings that were uploaded just for the sheer hell of it...

Here is a list of paintings that no longer exist:) -

"Beauty in squalor?"

I think this is a disturbing image, not because its a legless man standing on his head in a wasteland, but because its somehow, i dont know why, such a voyeuristic image. The painter seems devoid of character, no... not character, because i think there is a distinct style there. And style is a carrier of character. But it's devoid of understanding. Now i may be way off here because i am the painter, but trying to look at this from an outside perspective, it strikes me that i wouldn't understand why the painter decided to depict a legless man, why a legless man instead of just an ordinary man, i dont think i would understand  his motives, and wouldnt be sure if the painter was sympathetic to such a person, or treating it as some sort of freakshow/shock tactic thing.

With the idea of Chekov's gun in mind, that everything represented is expected to mean something, it would confuse me looking at this, because i wouldnt know what it meant. So let me tell you that this is the 3rd attempt to paint this. The first two (i think they're uploaded below) have legs, the 2nd attempt was a lot brighter, it was disorienting the amount of colours that were used, there was no let up, no 'brown' (see entry below). Then i thought i'd add some brown, and it seemed to work, i wiped out the legs, corrected the face and arm (although the arm is still not right), and changed the background. The blue jumper i just thought worked lovely, so i left it, it remains the only thing unchanged. And then i had a go at the body, intending to do the legs as well, but once i'd painted this torso it just struck me that i should just leave it like that. Not a moral or allegorical decision, just an aesthetic one. Take from that what you will.

You see something a lot in certain artists and directors, a flitting, an erratic change from one route to the next, the Coen Brothers for example, there work doesnt sit well together, i can't find the right word, its like they go from the silliness of The Ladykillers, to the depth of No Country For Old Men, there's no cohesion there, and no worry, those two could have been made by two seperate people.. (granted that two seperate people make up the Coen's..)

But you don't find it in Paul Thomas Anderson, maybe he flitted a little with Punch Drunk Love, but you could tell it all came from the same person, it was an addition to his journey, not a cul-de-sac or a diversion.

Is that a mark of immaturity? the ability to be so relaxed about it all, for it to not cause you any problem in moving all over the place in morals and ideals and styles. There's a difference between the changes that Philip Guston made in his career, from murals to abstract expressionism to minimalism to cartoons, because that was a genuine growth, it seems.

Well, i've been flitting.

dissapointment and violence

Hmmm...

I filmed myself painting, its quite heavily edited but its not sped up, and i think it actually gives a good impression of how i paint. Things which i didn't even notice before. Like how the brush moves about the painting, it goes from one object to the next, going on a sort of journey floating across the canvas. And of course, how many times i actually go over something, there's a spot near the end where my hand is just incessantly going back to the same spot, like an obsessive.

It did help the expressionisticy type painting come out more by listening to Muse full blast (you can hear the noise), that's why my singing sounds like a deaf man, the ear phones were just so loud.

I tried going back over this painting today, this is the third time i've tried correcting it.. and now the last. I redid the face 3 or 4 times, and just got so frustrated with it and other things that i got a bit vicious trying to scrape the paint off and sliced it. The first stab was an accident, after that i couldn't help myself, i just got into a sort of frenzied attack. It's my release, and it's got common the last week.. me attacking paintings, i can't for life of me think why..

the colour brown

I been thinking of manchester lately. What set it off was I just got an email from Blank Media, that a couple of my poems had been accepted for publication, i sent that submission off in June 2009, so wasn't really expecting anything back. But there it was, and well, i've always had an emo tendency to write poems, but it was only in that 3rd year in manchester that i actually did it regularly. At night i'd 'retire' (it seemed like an appropriate, old word to use) to my room with beer or whisky or whatever else, and sit down at my laptop, this laptop, and write. Sometimes i'd watch a foreign film i'd borrowed from the university library. Most nights i'd have boiled eggs, rice and frozen mixed vegetables, which i'd boil all in the same water. Some nights i'd smoke, camel lights (big girl!), but would never feel addicted, it was a pleasure to, i'd try and blow smoke in rings. Occassionally it would get late and i'd just carry on through the night, go for a walk to spar, or matt and phreds (the jazz club), and get even more drunk, even more emotional, even more lonely. Rarely, locked up in my little room with few people to talk to, those feelings would become physical...

well. I always make a big deal out of new paintings, paintings which i feel are taking me in a promising route. I always do that (like with the last post on the black framed paintings) and it never seems to pan out. And this above is no exception, only it feels more me. More sincere, like how i used to paint a year ago in uni. Figures in strange wasteland type landscapes, fighting, being mauled by wild animals, dead, staring out, prostituting themselves.. Thats me, those paintings, those ideas, those colours, are me. And brown is the colour that is most associated with those paintings. Brown blends into the background, but it is the most subtle and beautiful of colours. To make brown you have to mix blue, red and yellow, all three primary colours. If you change the amounts of those three you make lovely tones of the secondary colours, purple, orange and green. I love brown because it doesnt hold attention, yet is integral to a painting. And that seems to be a theme which follows me around, that hiding at the sides, not causing a storm so people look, but waiting to be noticed - its wrapped up with my persona. Not everything can hold our attention, its disorienting if every part of a painting has a strange contrast or an interesting alteration of colours, or nice lines or just general points of interest. Parts of it have to hold back, has to be the backstage crew, and without that backstage lot there isn't much to show.

I've done 6 new paintings this week, all on hardboard, all about the same size, and all with a black frame.

This isn't new, i've done a black frame before, i did a whole series of them back in 2006, on the first year of my course. Then i wasn't quite sure what the point was, it was sort of vague, i liked old films, i liked the cinema screen, and the blackness surrounding a projection, and that was the influence. And most of the images inside of the screen where stolen/copied from films. And i played around a bit by inserting frames inside others, and having 20 frames side by side all took from a film noir, which admittedly people do like.

 

 

But now, that black frame is more than just the influence of film coming through. I actually see it as quite an effective way of making a painting.. for me. I almost liken it to Baselitz (who i love) turning all his paintings upside down. The frame isn't being explained or accented, its just there, it doesn't matter what picture goes inside it, it's just taken for granted that this frame surrounds it. Its like a negative, its looking into a viewfinder, it cuts off the image from the world even more, as there is a definite gap between whats 'out there' and painted here. It's almost like my whole style, whatever is 'me' in a painting, has been reduced to that frame. It gives me free reign to paint whatever the hell i like inside of it, it's still got my imprint on it because of that blackness (maybe i'll do other coloured frames.

 

Maybe it won't stay forever, maybe it's just a transitional phase i'm going through, maybe it's cheating, but it's simple and it's effective, so simple that it borders on cheesy, it might be no more than a macguffin, a 'rosebud', a regretful little quirk, a trick that gets it noticed, which in the end means nothing very much, and certainly requires that there be more substance on the image within. But that's the point i suppose, that's the problem; people notice tricks, they very rarely notice substance, not unless they're exposed to it for a long amount of time... After three years of roaming around Manchester Art Gallery, it was only in the last year that i started to notice the better paintings that i'd ignored the rest of the time. But it was the bolder, quirkier, dumber paintings which made me come back for more. And maybe this is me trying to find a happy compromise between dumb but attractive prettiness, and something more, both within the same image.

 

It's blunt, and i like that. So for now, it stays.

Panic on the streets of dudley

Last couple of weeks i've had the unstoppable feeling that its all going to shit.. I've sort of set myself on this tightrope; i have to be a painter, if i dont succeed as a painter i'm fucked - i have no back up plan. This is worrying, especially as i can't even get a simple job as a courier.. But, times are hard, jobwise, times are always hard otherwise. Hope things pick up soon though, can't paint without money.

 Anyway, found these two out recently, they're about 4 or 5 years old, did them on foundation course. Ones of my grandad, the others of me. And its made me think that maybe my painting skill has deteriorated since going to uni, as these are pretty good, and its been a while since i've done something as good.

This also is from college, the same year as the paintings, and its nothing like the stuff i do now. Maybe i've been conditioned by uni, or maybe thats an easy thing to say, a way of stopping myself looking at the truth.. maybe i just wasn't that good to begin with. And the good that i did produce, was a product of a specific time and place, influenced mainly by the people that surrounded me.

Sorry for the barrage of images, but these are the most recent ones, the ones that i think are better than the others, and i've done a lot. Looking at them now they don't seem too bad, but then why is nobody buying them? why have i got no leads? possibly because the right people aren't seeing them, which would be my fault.. Maybe i'm just having a moan, maybe this is one 'blog' to delete in the future.

There is this though;

 

This probably doesnt mean much to anybody else. Its a painting i havent seen in 15 years, if not more. It hung in what is now my dad's lounge, but back then it was his parents. And as a kid i remember seeing it all the time, being fascinated by it, much as i was fascinated by the deep dark cellar which had lemonade at the top, the outside toilet, the magnetic bluebottle, and the huge sideboard thing, most of those stuff have gone, burnt, rebuilt, or whatever. BUt the painting is there, leaning against a pigeon pen in the rain and the snow and all that, cracked, spoilt and irrepairable. And when i look at it i always associate it with my nan, who i never really knew, but she seemed nice; and there was a song, i dont know now how it went, something about 'holding hands', or something or other.