Having made my last post, the doubts began. The voice from behind asked ‘Are you sure?’, in particular with the notion that doing and thinking are one. I came to that conclusion from the point of view of a materialist. If there is nothing but matter, then thoughts, ideas, concepts, are material objects; thinking then becomes a a matter of moving and changing relationships between objects – words, numbers, symbols, marks. The distinction between conceptually based, and ‘skill’ based disciplines dissolves. The notion that there are skills becomes redundant. Techniques can be more or less skilfully applied. That was where I felt that the conceptual-skill dichotomy relied on a mistaken use of the notion of skill. Technique remains as the means whereby subject matter is probed in search of whatever …
I painted the pink bird (a little hard to see now it’s posted) out of a feeling that the flatness and tonal closeness to the background colour connected to the ‘deadness’of the bird. The yellowish line dropping from the top of the picture was intended to reach (out to?) the bird, but in painting it I arrived at a point where tension was created in the space in the centre. This subjective experience of tension was the surprise product of a technical process.
