Working on these line paintings, I can look at them and feel some pleasure. Attempting to write about them however brings a degree of nervousness.
The lines hover, and buzz a little. I like the spaces between them. There seems to be a nervous tension, a kind of anticipation suspended in spaces. The graded black – white painting was originally landscape oriented. Turned through 90degrees the lines and spaces seemed more assertive. It’s a very simple effect, but the way in which lines emerge, submerge and recede according to background has always been a delight. The black and white central lines, whose contrasts visually tilt them in opposite directions, seem to magnetically hold each other. (As I write I remember one of the first pieces in the Saatchi programme, magnets similarly bound by mutual attraction, never to meet). The coloured image is divided on arguably obvious lines. I approach the painting with one intention and change my mind as the line grows. The lines articulate space by creating identities of their own. As the space changes there seems to be a moment that feels right. There is a problem with writing; words can generate delusion. I like to see these lines and spaces as gently lyrical, but putting them into words seems to trivialise, or release a vulnerability born of the possibility that there is really less there than meets my eye. They are just lines on coloured surfaces.
Phil Illingworth’s forum discussion on Artist Statements has made me wonder how simply it can be written.
I am sitting in front of a painting. Wondering what and how I am thinking, and why. Looking at the surface, imagining possibilities about-for-in-on it. Mix some paint, take up a brush, approach the surface, make the mark-gesture-provocation-response, and look again. Whatever my first reaction, it can quickly change. Immediate reaction is incrementally modified. Or not as the case may be. The reaction is visceral. Disappointment-disapproval the hardest to deal with. Response of pleasure invites suspicion. It’s difficult to go back with an unsatisfactory mark; there is only one direction, which now takes a detour. My mental approach to making the gesture that leaves its mark is that of a moth to a light, a spiral toward something that I wish could satisfy. My physical approach is an act of faith. Looking again, it all begins to look like detour.
Reading Richard Rosch’s post on the Forum ‘Perverse….’ I return to the position that in essence, the practice is its own theory. What is done is what is thought, and consequently thought about. I went to the Ed Ruscha show at the Hayward recently. On close examination, some of the painting asks technical questions. Paint has bled under some letter stencils in a way that looks careless. The work can be read independently of the detail of execution. But how does such ‘carelessness’ (it might be termed ‘accident’) sit in an overall evaluation of his work? A writer is not judged by the formation of handwriting; should a visual artist employing words pay any particular attention to their drawn reality? I enjoyed the show; perhaps I’m nit picking.
I have been reading in Charles Harrison’s ‘Art in Theory 1900 – 2000’ an extract from Joseph Kosuth’s ‘Art after Philosophy’. What he says about painting and its condition underlines some of the problems that I have when I pick up a paintbrush. Juxtaposed with this are the references to the ‘Saatchi programme’ commented upon in Emily speed’s blog. She refers to A.A Gill’s review of last night’s programme. I have always felt a little guilty at not really being in tune with the imperial status of Duchamp, and to read such a tirade is a little reassuring. The trouble with things that ‘ring true’, however, is that they tend to appeal to prejudice. I wonder if it is possible to be to the political left, whilst simultaneously being guilty of the worst formalist crimes as described by Kosuth. Also I have been painting. At present I have to confess to the crimes; I have no choice but to commit them. I can, (I think), see Kosuth’s point, but I cannot feel it. There is too a feeling of impending disaster. I tend to rush around the a-n living room like an excited puppy dog, only to end up in the corner having wet the carpet. So onward and downward!
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