I have spent some time stretching and priming a number of canvases. I am making some paintings using, so far, primary colours. I have in mind surfaces divided centrally. Beyond that I do not know. I painted some of them in Red, Yellow, Blue, and one secondary – Green. Plain flat colours. The sheer pleasure of it took me by surprise. An intense hue made from Cadmium and Lemon Yellow almost makes my teeth tingle. (Maybe something as corny as a connection with lemon juice?) But not just the ‘teeth’. I found the experience of yellow so pleasant. (sun?) So with Cadmium Red, and French Ultramarine tinted with Titanium white, the sheer coulour-fullness of the surfaces is immensely satisfying. With the complementary coloured line that will divide each surface, I am searching for an intense (for me) visual event. There seems to be something in this idea of a vertical division. I am concerned that a single line is somehow falls short of what the painting might aspire to. The dividing line centrally placed on a canvas seems to point at difference, whilst symmetry contradicts it. Ambivalence appeals to me.
These colours take an age to dry.
Whilst I wait, I have been drawing. In conversation at a recent exhibition, questions were raised about the drawing in a particular work. Were what appeared to be perspectival distortions deliberately designed to enhance a sense of unreality? Were they mistakes? They could be read within the work as intention, or as outside the intention as it was ‘felt’ in the work. In the event that they were intentional, were they adequate? In so far as the intention could be read in what was seen, to what extent did the image realise its potential? Could the work as a whole succeed in spite of what might be unresolved questions? Those of us talking about the work approached it from a variety of ‘perspectives’. Like much of this kind of conversation, as much might have been revealed about the participants as the object under scrutiny. The question arises as to how such disparity of judgement occurs in the first place, and following from that, what is the genesis of one’s own judgement. Maybe it is something to do with the apparent limits of description and the always tentative framing of questions. Whatever is asked or said becomes subject to the same kind of speculation as the work discussed.
I have been making these drawings with that conversation in mind. I find when I am drawing, control oscillates between me and the drawing, (which might just be a smart way to avoid saying that sometimes I can achieve my intentions, and sometimes I cannot). When the drawing is dominant, (when I am struggling) I have to claw my way back into it. I recognise that I am getting back into it when anxiety recedes. I suppose for me an important element of what I do resides in not failing. But it depends upon a process of resolution of failure rather than a processs of successful solution. My conversations about art are often like that, in that my dominant feelings are bound up with anxiety rather than pleasure. These drawings contain factual errors, technical errors, and deliberate deviation from the factual. The physical movements involved in making a line or tone have in themselves visual potential – responding to marks- having a kind of conversation with(in) the process. I suppose that some drawing comes to completion when its conflicting elements hold themselves in a state of precarious tension.
