Years ago I used to run, not very fast. I wasn’t going anywhere. The repetitive nature of running was what it was about. It was simple and physical, variations in surface, rough, smooth, wet, slippery, an occasional hill, sometimes mostly hill, and then the pleasure of the downhill. Running into the wind was always intensely irritating. I took it personally that the wind opposed me; immensely counterproductive irritation stained the experience. But running with the wind at my back was lovely; and like hills, you have to have it both ways. Physical work is a thing in itself; drawing is a physical act in itself, for itself, of itself? Is just the fact of making things that are named paintings, drawings and so on, enough? Enough for what? Just enough like running. What becomes of the thing left over, the ‘drawing’ when the day ends? Show it to other people? Put it in a box? It is the memory of a run. It is a record, to fade; I was there and I did that. (in terms of my movements and gestures, I did ‘this’)
If I ask myself what I feel about something such as a an artwork, I point to elements and aspects of the thing, describing possibilities and possible names. Naming creates context. Context forms meaning. Some of the marks here are weaker than others. I scribble a bit and think ‘Cy Twombly” and the sounds of Cy and sigh. I hit the paper with my graphite. ‘I don’t paint, I hit,’ said Karel Appel. I want a distinction to disappear, for birdmarks and other marks to become ambiguous, for the exact placing of the bird to become an impossibility and for it to still be ‘there’. I too hit, to beat distinction into submission. I hit. Hitting draws. Ambiguity, ambivalence, repeat as the act of hitting. I feel momentary satisfaction and then the thing is slipping away, the drawing thing, the image thing, the object thing. In my workshop in my garden in my middle-class road I am ambivalent about Twombly’s marks and mine. This drawing is 5ft long. Drawing and running temporarily exhaust the irritations.
Do I really like line, paint, and want things to look nice? I put that in front of me to see how I felt about it.
This painting tests the question. Its single pink line is mixed from the base blue-grey and Cadmium Red. I was surprised at how the blue-grey felt to me, having weight which gave substance to the surface. It had a ‘heavy’ look. The pink line I wanted to be tonally close to the blue-grey. It would be about a centimetre wide, and placed where it felt right. But when I painted it initially narrow and looked at it, it stared back at me, defied me to do more; defiance in its straightness and intimidation in its colour. The effect of the pink on the blue-grey surprised me. I noted a visual change in the smaller portion of blue, which shouldn’t have come as a surprise, but did, the power of the pink line somehow disproportionate. I cannot touch it again. I like it? I have stretched some more canvases for a series to take the line further down the road. I feel that they should be wordless, like the pink line, something with which to be. There is no need to like it. It satisfies something.
Ambivalence is central to my relationship with this Art stuff. These things began with a burst of enthusiasm in the physical energy of stretching, priming, putting them together, and pleasure in anticipation of what they might become. In the doing, doing seems reason enough. Tension felt in the act of painting a line is a kind of heightening. Stop, step back, and it seems bizarre. I had imagined ambivalence as oscillatiion. Sitting in front of these things it has the nature of discontent for which the things provide no resolution, oscillation tightens, becomes a knot. They began as flat colours with a central dividing line some weeks ago. After a period away from painting I came back to them, rediscovered them having forgotten. Those tedious lines again. I scrubbed paint over them. I had thought of them as series. They do seem purposeful when seen together. Individually the sense of the temporal disappears. Line in an indeterminate colour space embodies ambivalence. Always something missing. This insistent sense of the missing is the motivating factor in doing this stuff, confirmation of what seems to be a need that always there must be evidence of the missing, and the hope that the space will be filled, that the next act might be one of resolution. I am sitting in my workshop. My fan heater blows with the flatness and tonality of my colours. The last track on a Lightnin’ Hopkins CD, counterpoint to the blower, ends.
Louis Armstrong replaces Lightnin’. ‘What a Wonderful World’, suggestive of other possibilities. I like stretching canvases. I like lines. I like paint. I want them to look nice.
These pieces were ostensibly a response to domestic artefacts from Knole House, in this case a small hand-held brazier, once used to warm the cold corners of rooms in the house, the other a pair of Goffering tongs, used hot to create corrugations in the fabric of ruffes. The project came about via an invitation from Franny Swann, Ros Barker, and Sue Evans, who made the initial proposal to work from objects, originally from Knole, now in Sevenoaks Museum, – I think that’s the gist of it – something out of my usual comfort zone. Initially I floundered. I’m not a researcher, or narrative artist. Maybe I sought a way out. But the formal qualities of these objects, that which could be seen and felt, nudged away at me to produce a relatively simple response, of corrugated forms. The physicality of making the forms, the blue one of stretched cotton duck over routered formers, the brown piece of plywood structure with cotton duck glued to it was a real pleasure. Each is about 60in x 40in, little tactile thoughts from small objects, magnified, projected and returned through a material process, the domestic narratives of the original objects jettisoned, communication with the past simply implicit. There remains nevertheless an insistent link through engagement with form to the original makers and users of the objects. The theme of the show, ‘Echo’ resonates too in the stripes of colour. In the brown piece, colours reminiscent of burnt coals progress in tone and placement across each other, crossing unknowingly at the centre, in much the same way that in coming across these objects, my path crosses those of others unknown, connected and separated through time and space. Lines on the blue object are complementaries placed on opposite ridges.
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Nice? Writing my previous post I began to see more clearly the way in which I was using the term as a pejorative. I have used ‘nice’ as an unqualified shorthand confirmation of my prejudices, partly class based. The distinction between taking a stand and parroting preconceptions is obfuscated by thoughtless use of terms. Elena Thomas opened up this issue with her comment re ‘nice’ and ‘satisfactory’. It is about the politicising of terms. And in that sense it is about power and ideological hegemony. I use the term in part to defend myself from threat. What I describe as nice, I imply is not nice in a manner that lacks (or exposes) the (lack of) courage of my convictions. Using terms in this way enables me to avoid what I know may be true, a transference as I endow something other with my shortcomings. That’s what has concerned me recently, that my ‘art’ is an avoidance strategy held in place by appropriate values and language. This painting was made, and is still being made, alongside the dotty bird. In both I decided to allow what might be nice to emerge, and to be at ease with it. That may simply be surrender. Referring to Anthony’s post, I wonder if there is a kind of nice that is so because it lacks the courage to be beautiful, ugly, truthful, an anxious stopping short, and a diversion of life- painting-art, into deferential ritual. My previous post made mention of ‘..my six year old…’ and what should happen but a nearly-six-year-old arrived at my workshop to continue with her painting. It is true that a six year old can do it. The language of infantilising is another instance of ideology disguised as judgement. Having put both images on the post, comparison is both necessary and inevitable.
