Studio Blog
23rd February 2010
No blog entries for ages; this is because I've changed my computer and have been unable to get the software to run on the new one... Hopefully it will soon be fixed and I can return to updating my blog. In the meantime, I'm going to look into doing a blog on a different site. Details will be posted on here soon.
27th November 2009
A week today I shall be at Firstsite in Colchester doing a one-day residency as part of their '15 Days, 15 Artists' residency project. I will step right outside my comfort zone and try out working very differently for a day... I'll swap my very private studio and my oil paints and canvas, and unlimited timescales, for a public space, large sheets of paper, water-based (mainly monochrome) paints and inks, and a fixed, short, time. What will I come up with? I can't predict. I always work with randomness, it's fundamental to my working process, so I won't be doing any planning other than acquiring the necessary materials and keeping in mind a notion of 'fifteen' (as an age) as a loose theme. At the end of the day, there might be nothing worth showing, which would be a shame in a way, but I suspect I shall learn a lot from the experience nonetheless. I'm really excited! I have never done anything like this before.
26th November 2009
Wouldn't it be amazing to paint like Titian? Seeing in the Louvre his portrait of a young boy, 'Ranuccio Farnese' (normally in the National Gallery of Art, Washington) and the way he can use paint to be skin, to be fabric, to be metal... To say it's clever imitation misses the point, for me. It's more than that. My reaction to paint is a bodily thing, a felt thing, I can't quite explain it, and so although I love looking at really good photographs, I don't get that kinaesthetic reaction to them that I get when I look at this painting.
25th November 2009
Went to the Louvre on Monday to see 'Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice'. I really wish I'd been able to see these paintings when they were first painted. How did the artist mean them to look? Two in particular by Tintoretto: 'The Baptism of Christ' (ca.1580), normally in San Silvestro, Venice; and 'The Miracle of St Augustine' (1549-1550), normally in Museo Civico, Venice. I want to know how much Tintoretto was aware of playing with the paint, and with the viewer, playing with layers and drips and the ambiguities of meaning that these can engender. 'The Baptism of Christ' is fascinating. The painting has a hideous (to me) area in the top left section, with a bird and lots of gold. Who painted this bit? Then there is a beautiful, lyrical, sensual passage in the centre where the paint is thin and dripping - it caught my eye straight away, perhaps because I seem to be so obsessed with drips and smears and washes of paint at the moment in my own work. What was Tintoretto doing here? Did he wish more of the painting could have this quality? Or was it a mistake, an unfinished area? Our 21st century eyes must see paint like this in such a different way from those of the 16th century.
19th November 2009
I cling to the notion that time spent painting is never wasted as long as one is honestly challenging one's preconceptions and trying to be authentically experimental and open in a hunt for something true... I tell my students this all the time in the Life class, trying to get them to see that an afternoon spent crafting a slick, 'nice' (as they may see it) finished drawing might be of far less value than one in which a frustrating, messy time ends up with a crumpled, thrown-away piece of paper, if in the latter session they have really felt themselves stretched and challenged to look and see differently. Many, many sessions in my own studio end with no useful result in terms of paint on canvas that 'works'. More often than I would like, a good passage in a painting is obliterated, to be replaced with something mediocre that I know cannot remain for long. It can feel dispiriting, but I can't let it be. It's only paint, it's only canvas, it's only time... don't think about waste!
15th November 2009
I went to 'Angels of Anarchy: Women Artists and Surrealism' at Manchester Art Gallery today. I don't think I'd seen any of the pieces before, except in books, so it was really worth going to. I was most struck by some stunning photographic work, particularly by Claude Cahun, Lee Miller and Francesca Woodman. I think this may be what stays with me the most. The paintings in the show were interesting, but I seem to find them so on a conceptual and historical level rather than as paintings. The 'stuff' of the paint, and the formal qualities of these paintings don't speak to me in an exciting way.
11th November 2009
Reading Ruth Padel's "52 Ways of Looking at a Poem" over breakfast, I came across this: 'Poetry gets its energy from tension between the human imperfections, untidiness and limits it starts from, and its own struggle for formal perfection, for music and cadence'. It chimes with something I'm very aware of in painting at the moment: the energy inherent in the tension between the mess and almost-chaos of 'stuff', and the desire in the viewer (and the artist) for the soothing consolations of order and beauty.
10th November 2009
Some painter friends came to my studio recently. Most of my work is away in exhibitions at the moment, which is good: it meant that we looked at the unfinished paintings (there are around ten canvases on the go). Until now I've been very wary of showing unfinished work to anyone (even my family): I think I needed to search so hard inside myself for the thread that leads the way in the process of making a painting, and the thread was very, very delicate and too liable to be blown away or off course by someone else's views. After 20 years of persistently painting I finally feel more rooted, and can hear and dialogue with other people's views whilst a piece of work is still in progress; and also I'm finding myself increasingly open to new, surprising ways within myself of looking at painting.
9th November 2009
I use Flake White - white lead - a poison, hard to obtain and horrifying to use. It’s often a battle with white. Thick white, a clumsy doorman not letting us pass. Or white when it crushes and deadens and obliterates and makes me despair that all delicacy is lost. White a sullen spoiler, muddying the colours and messing up their clarity and their strength. All of those whites are needed at times. Then there’s thin white, moving and swirling, each brushmark a possibility. White over white, inviting us to ponder the space between the two (how can it be infinite, yet non-existent?). White when it floats and sings breathily of soft sweet puffs, gentle vaporous wisps. Warm fat white sitting plump on top of the canvas, creating a stepping-stone between the viewer and the deeper, sinking, more troubling layers of paint. White like a capable nurse, making things clean and decisive.
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