A long and probably ultimately fruitless day in the studio today, wrestling with the acrylics… How anyone gets it to work is beyond me! Two major issues: (1) trying to get the ‘stuff’ to work, the physicality of it all (‘the alchemy’ as James Elkins might say); (2) the big ongoing struggle which is always so intrinsic to my work: the struggle of working on the edge where a kind of emotive beauty meets something more visceral, raw and edgy. (The kind of emotive beauty I’m thinking about here lies in an appealing face, for example, perhaps with a soft expression.)
Your strength can also be your weakness. In my case, the ability to draw a face in a certain way. The thing is, I do want my work to express aspects of human physicality, imbued with the emotional and (dare I say) spiritual qualities that we can infer when we look at it. On the other hand, there’s the danger of the work being ‘sweet’ and even pretty. I am conscious that I am really working on the edge of sweetness a lot of the time, and this I find invigorating, infuriating and really challenging. Quite often I seem to dramatically visualise it in my mind (remembering school geography lessons) as an arête, a knife-edged ridge. The path meanders, so you have to keep checking you are following the ridge exactly, being constantly careful not to slither down into sentimentality/prettiness on the one side, or – or what on the other? Loads of risks there too, ranging from brutishness to blandness to meaningless gesture to you-name-it. The other thing about ‘sweetness’ for me involves colour. The moment you move beyond monochrome black-and-white, you get caught up in people’s assumptions and responses to colour. The vivid magentas I often use – to me they speak of vigour, but to some people it’s prettily pink. And to others, these colours are simply distasteful. (To me too, sometimes! – I loved Thomas Hylander’s and Nick Goss’s subdued limited palettes in their paintings at the Jerwood art space, wondering for the nth time why I didn’t work this way…).
Of course, it’s all really subjective. There will be plenty of people who find my work distasteful because of the types of faces I tend to paint, or the colours I use. And my own views change over time, too. A lot of my past work now appals me… Which is probably as it should be. Keep moving on.
