The drawing came first. Drawing dictates to me how it is to be done. It is a tactile matter, feeling and feelings. Sometimes making a line is a matter of precision, a surgical strike. At other times it is indiscriminate, carpet bombing. This drawing began as indiscriminate, evolving with greater precision. I started to write that the drawing looks like the pigeon, but a drawing always looks like a drawing. The (real) pigeon happens to be one of the sources of the drawing. There is always a signature in the work.
The painting was (is possibly) to be constructed in a much more detailed manner. I made preliminary marks and stopped. I liked what I had done. I am tempted to express satisfaction with the image; liking somehow seems trivial compared to satisfaction!!!
Victor Burgin, in ‘The end of Art Theory’ refers to the ‘Bloomsbury….aesthetes’, Clive Bell and Roger Fry. He states (writing in 1986) that ‘The antiquated legacy of Bloomsbury is today a self-complacent cult of ‘taste’ and ‘response’ which stifles ‘intellectualisation’ to protect a supposed ‘authenticity’ of expression and feeling – that which comes as ‘second nature’, or as Pascal observed,, ‘first habit’. Burgin encapsulates in this the problem of liking things. The painting arguably falls within the remit of Bloomsbury Aesthetics. I am apprehensive of that possibility. The unconscious production of ‘tasteful’ objects is something to be wary of. To see such a thing reveal itself in front of me is to confront myself with an uncomfortable possibility. It is as though I am accused of an aesthetic crime. And in so far as the aesthetic and the moral are related judgements, the accusation goes beyond the marks?
