I’ve been going in 2 directions this week. I’ve been eager to put oil paint on a big canvas and get the oil paint smell going again. This has come about mainly due to me pulling out a canvas from about a year ago and just having a look at it. It looks better now than how I remembered it. It looks raw and almost effortless, I like the rushed look, although it certainly wasn’t rushed, there is lots of bare canvas, some charcoal marks, something that could be figurative, it’s unfinished quality. After playing about for some weeks with cardboard, I decided to build a cardboard model of a part of the painting. The drawings of the fallen box seemed to do something for me, so I wanted to explore this route a little further. I then made up a large canvas, the size of the old painting and started work, working from the cardboard model and what was left of that fallen box from the other week and the resulting drawings. So I’m making a painting of a 3D model of a painting. A different starting point, but what does it all mean?
So the see-through paintings, or rather the ink on plastic pieces, these remain ongoing. I like that they are small and can easily be picked up and moved around. I was writing in my sketchbook some ideas about what these pieces of work are about. I made some interesting discoveries during this process of looking and writing. I was thinking about disguise, maybe that one layer is trying to disguise itself by using another layer, and this thought led me to the idea of cealing oneself. The thing is the layers are transparent or translucent, so it’s not a great place to hide. I then re-wrote the old notion of trying to look closely to see beneathe the surface to see what is really going on, which led me to think about false identities, different realalities. I’ll be continually thinking about this, and will probably find it hard to sleep as it’s been on my mind constantly, which actually might be a good thing.
