This is an image of an object.
The object is material.
The material supports an image.
The image forms in a medium.
The medium is material.
The image of the object is material.
The material of the image is a medium.
Medium and material are real.
The real is wordless.
Material is meaning.
The material of the object is paper.
The paper supports an image.
The material of the image is graphite.
Graphite and paper form an object.
The object has a name.
The object is a drawing.
The drawn have names.
This is a felt object?
Felt between the lines?
Felt in the spaces?
Felt through the names?
Felt through the material?
What is drawn is not there.
Do names settle lightly on material,
Like birds in trees?
There are occasions when I ‘paint’ with a sense of the perverse. Deliberately provoking an argument, I prod and poke paint and defy it to become a painting. I seem to want to paint so badly that something purposeful might arise, this art thing somehow there despite my doing my best to prove that it isn’t, painting sustained by feelings of wilfully pleasureable annoyance. There is something deeply childish about it all, like making a mess in order to attract attention, something Freudian in the smearing of paint. ( This a both confession and description? ) Usually I get to a point where I am ground down by my annoyance and I bin the work. But despite the anxieties of it, it still LOOKS like something, has an appearance, maybe a personality, where its connection with stuff called art begins to crystallise along the edges. My stuff doesn’t mean anything other than what it looks like. I dislike the basic designy art class notion of ‘mark-making’ but if I’m not careful, or more to the point, if I become too ‘careful’ that’s what will be the outcome – designy stuff. And paradoxically, all I am doing is making marks? But I am really not doing that. I am marking, figuring and disfiguring, a surface . That is why ‘mark-making’ is an academic exercise, whilst marking a surface is an engagement with something. To paint is to walk a tightrope where the superficially similar in terms of acts disguises deep differences of motivation and meaning; I can stand before a work that I like and watch as it metamorphoses into a nice design for a rug.
With my beachcombery attitude to this stuff, I keep on picking things up until it gets too dark and cold, and then look in the bag to see what the day’s tides have thrown up. Smudgy paint, thin, drawing that changes, evolves? Working with rolled – up pieces of old t-shirts, cleanly defined fine distinctions being difficult, only longer sharper boundaries and borders are possible for me. Beak and feet pose the biggest problems, birdy details demanding to be structured appropriately. Consistency of touch will hold whatever it turns out to be, together. Like the good-enough mother, the good-enough painting as the best that might be hoped for, is what I hope for. My painter is not presently good enough; the stuff in the bag remains in ever-present danger of being returned to the sea when the light goes and cold closes in. This particular bag of pigeon and paint is just about sustaining me through the mental and physical cold weather that exists at the moment.
I notice as I sit here writing, that the sun is out. The sun comes out periodically in my daubing too. A smudge of paint suddenly seeming to light up the thing with a pertinent contrast or harmony; somewhere along the line there may be a painting to be had. I’m working with the t-shirt material stretched over my finger tip, rubbing and dabbing the paint – it hadn’t occurred me yesterday. The painting, if it is to be there might just emerge from my tidal sediments as the tip of something. My beachcomber must be alert to the clue; false alarms seem to be the order of the day, periodic excitements rising and fading. But just along there somewhere….. might be a dull example of grey English stuff….Back to the beach tomorrow. What was yesterday below the surface might now just be emerging.
