I have tried three times to write a supporting statement for an application to a well –known artists’ site. Writing such a statement is extremely difficult, as others have attested to. The site recommends the reading of some exemplar statements.
I admire the confident tone of some, although occasionally the work seems not to live up to the grandeur of its introduction. Some of it I cannot believe.
There are some who seem also to have difficulties, their writing seemingly expressing discomfort in the process. And I recognise too my desire not to be rejected; I retreated from the writing of my Supporting statement.
But I have a difficulty and must either understand and go beyond it or recognise its validity and withdraw from the process, which is what the following is partly about. If I am to write about the work, I need to know what can be written.
I have been working on a series of paintings which move away from the figurative. The most recent is 6ft x 4ft and is essentially a series of 96 grey disc shapes in a grey field. As with previous work I find that visual and tactile sit close together. The longest dimension is greater than my height and wider than the span of my arms; being close to it is to be inside it. I work on it and over it, increasing and diminishing contrasts, bringing tones as close as leaves little difference, but sufficiently different that closeness never absorbs identity. There is something of the corny ‘therapeutic’ in their making. It is undeniably pleasant, soothing, simply applying the paint. In greyness there is something ‘English’, bordering on the romantic, worryingly sentimental? I need to have something perverse in my painting, something that presents a threat to its niceness, something ambiguous. I ask myself if a disconcerting blandness is sufficiently unsettling? The grey discs are something of a cliché. (I seem to remember a similar pattern on Formica!!) I have in mind problems of ‘style’. Thinking about the possibility of undermining stylistic seductions, I wondered if I could work ‘blind’. But the tactile element of applying paint seems prior to the visual. Seeing the paint surface is not quite simultaneous with its application; the expression is a muscular act before it is a visual consequence. The effect is anticipated by the whole body. There is no escaping myself. Is there a sense in which having a subject is a means of avoiding uncomfortable questions? A figurative form draws attention to itself and distracts me from recognising a truth about what I am doing. Having a painting ‘of’ something could be a distraction from the ‘why’ of the work; it could supress the fear of the answer to ‘why?’
