No two days are ever quite the same. This drawing, if it is a drawing, arose from a total loss of idea.
It is a mindless act, but impossible not to think about. Each day, adding more dots, I become aware of the obvious. The pencil tip wears. I am distracted by my radio. My thoughts drift away; I no longer pay attention. The totality grows. Tonal variation arises from pressure applied, sharpness of pencil, tiredness. Spacing varies, closer and more distant depending upon speed of application, attention to detail. Time of day seems important. Variation in angle of application affects the shape of the mark, sometimes circular, sometimes stabbing. It has become like my colour paintings from a short time ago, defiant. Or is it defiant? Perhaps it is opaque, has no potential. Is there really nothing there to see? Making the dots is obsessive. The first dot removes all possibility of choice -or does it? Perhaps that is all that it is – a displacement activity. Something to do in place of doing something. I like the surface, albeit that it is in places clumsily made, replete with weaknesses and uncertainties. Is a surface of identical dots possible? Do I like it because it is mindless? Why should I like it? It is simply ‘there’. We are drawn to things. We are drawn in in things. We are drawn by things. There is a temptation to make recognisable – to generate an ‘image’. To find a landmark. To know where I am. To be safe. To know where I am implies space. The counter urge is to be absorbed. To have no space. I anticipate the relief to be gained from solving or avoiding the problem. Anticipation might be preferable to disappointment. I like its opacity; it invites me to resolve it, prompts me to refuse. I recognise a recurring tension. – a refusal to give to the work what it needs, a refusal to give to myself what I need. Childish or child-like? It is neither beginning nor end, problem or solution It is both necessary and pointless. Juxtaposition is potential; spaces the source of energy. Spaces between words. There is a spatial ‘not being’. Dots and words and myself press in upon each other. Or reach out? ‘Dot’ seems a silly word.
The sun shone today. I picked up a pencil and felt energised. The Coaltit is doing well to ‘survive’ this long. Sometimes I can happily draw with hardly a care.
This painting has had a number of ‘lives’
Life One was an abstract surface and line ‘Yes but what is it about?’
Life Two ‘Yes but I Still don’t Understand’ I enjoy the sensuality of paint. It ought not to bother me. This was an attempt to develop the bird painting series. It was problematic from the start. Life One was not initially intended as a support for Life Two, but was adopted as a possibility. Life Two had a simpler appearance, but the greys were dead; my heart was not really in it.
The bird imposed upon it never felt right. Lives One and Two were incompatible.
But I didn’t want to ‘waste’ what I had done or the time that I had spent on it. I find it very difficult to throw things away. I have boxes of nuts and bolts, bits of plumbing, offcuts, on shelves in my shed, that one day might find a use. Who is to know what might become of nuts and bolts and dead birds?
Life Three came about with a short burst of sunlight and a shadow in my workshop. A motif of bars was introduced , but again sat awkwardly. Another layer gave birth to Life Four, this time with more contrast. Five vertical bar-like lines partially overlaid with cloudy greys allowed the birds to float free. One for the shelf? Life Four ‘This is an Acorn.’
I have found myself in the doldrums recently. Bird and line have become moribund? How to revive? Keep going. If there is some underlying motivation for this work, to continue will test its capacity for renewal. In the meantime there remains only technique?
The process is one of feeling, perhaps an impotent desire for the bird to sing once more? Might it sing by proxy, drawing as a drawing – out of silenced song, hearing with the eye? One day, perhaps.
Rob and Jane, thank you, why use a small knot when a big one will suffice? When painting goes well for me it seems to settle into a rhythm that simply needs following; when it goes badly it a disproportionate amount of energy is needed to overcome it. I carried on with this to see where it would lead. As I was working, the sun shone briefly through a blind in my studio, casting a shadow across one of the images. It gave the impression of the bars of a cage. For a moment I was back, a child in my Grandmother’s front room, light flowing through the bars of her budgerigar cage. A possibility flickered in the ‘shadow cage’. The reason that I disliked the painting was to do in part with the spaces in it. They lacked tension. The cage offered an approach to the problem. And the juxtapositions seemed resonant. I was trying to introduce some kind of dynamic through the use of several images, and through the juxtaposition of flat with descriptive painting. I think I know what you mean about the singular image.
As regards working theories, questions and answers, the work is the only theory I have. (The answer frames the question?) It is a bringing to the surface of something through the business of looking and feeling, around subject and materials? There is no theory in it beyond an accumulation of experience and reflection. There is an important sense in which I don’t know anything about anything.
Over the past month or so I have been revisiting this difficulty of meaning and relevance, mainly because as I have noted, I frequently find myself uncomfortably at odds with the judgements of others, and wonder why this should be. And it must have a bearing on my painting.
I like the idea of being ‘tied in knots and coming out back to front!!!’ Writing this stuff is a tangling experience! I do find my predicament perversely amusing.
We have lots of fatballs and seeds out for the birds in our garden . Wood pigeons, collared doves, sparrows, blackbirds, and starlings, feed. Bluetits dart back and forth. The robins have stayed away. Occasionally a squirrel competes. I watch them as I work. I guess my birds have had lives like the ones you see from your kitchen. My mother-in-law’s cremation took place on Friday. People and birds.
